cookie.castles

Holy hell. I just spent two hours with the girls and one of their friends, and it felt like ten hours. We made gingerbread houses. *a* got some premade pieces that I put together and then let the kids go to town on. It sounds pretty straight forward, but was far from it. These are the steps involved:

1. Heat up sugar to make syrup.
2. Use the syrup to attach the pieces of gingerbread. Careful! Hot sugar will burn you!
3. Hold the pieces together until the sugar solidifies. Then pull all the stringy pieces off and put them back in the pot.
4. By now, forty-five minutes have passed and all four houses should be put together. Spend a few minutes running your burnt fingers under cold water.
5. Have kids open all the candy and dump into bowls while you melt butter and cream on the stove. Add some confectionery sugar and vanilla, beat with the mixer, and you have some darn good frosting.
6. Spread frosting over one roof section of each house. In thirty seconds, half the candy's gone, and they're all asking for more frosting.
7. Frost the other side of the roof and the chimney. *e* pushes too hard on the roof, and one of the short walls breaks. Fix it with frosting, and tell her to be gentle.
8. Make some more frosting so they can decorate the walls too. See *e* cramming candy in her mouth when she thinks you're not looking.
9. Add some frosting to *m's* roof to keep some gumdrops from falling off.
10. *e* crushes her entire house. It's reduced to a pile of gingerbread rubble. Surprisingly, she's not upset. Apparently the fact that she can still eat it outweighs any dissapointment at the disaster.
11. Put the finished creations on the counter and have the kids clean up the table and the leftover candy. (All two pieces of it.)
12. Send the kids off and start to clean up the disaster of a kitchen.

There you have it. You too can be the proud owner of some fancy schmancy gingerbread houses. It reminded me of when we used to make one for christmas every year. My dad would make the dough from scratch and cut out the pieces. He'd put it together, and my siblings and I would fancy that thing up with a necco wafer roof, m+m windows and a menage of trees, steps, etc. It was a beauty. People would nibble on the gingerbread, but mainly eat the candy off of it. We stopped making this several years ago, and it was sad. Very sad.