Gingerbread Houses

All this talk about ginger and spices and Christmas baking brings up wonderful memories of making gingerbread houses with our son. Initially we made basic gingerbread houses – typically cabins in the woods with four walls and a pitched roof. They were encrusted with frosting and gumdrops and peppermint and all types of candies. The neighborhood kids could not wait to destroy the gingerbread houses and then eat the (very stale and hard) building materials.

We used the gingerbread recipe from the Betty Crocker Cookie Book (a gift from the family for which I babysat as a teenager). The recipe was selected due to its excellent flavor and building properties. It calls for four favorite holiday spices – cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and allspice.

Little gingerbread house in the woods, complete with lolipop windows.

As our son got older, he and I pushed the design and architecture limits for gingerbread. We experimented with many shapes and structures. One year we made a cutaway gingerbread house (Santa’s workshop)—almost like a dollhouse—with scenes inside and out. That year we battled with a sagging second story floor. The year we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, we created a two-dimensional reproduction of several key buildings and landmarks. Our challenge was to keep the large cookies upright.

 

San Franciso Bay Area in gingerbread - Painted Ladies, Coit Tower,
Transamerica building, and the Bay Bridges.

Another year we created a structure from one of our son’s favorite manga stories – a tubular building with a mushroom dome. Our attempts to bake a tube-shaped cookie did not work, but we came up with a workable solution by gluing flat cookies to a round oatmeal cookie box with frosting.

 

Merry manga Christmas in gingerbread. 

At some point we stopped making gingerbread houses (other priorities moved in), but we have some great memories of working together to create our gingerbread masterpieces. Now, we use the same recipe to bake delicious batches of gingerbread men and women every Christmas season!