Uncategorized 13 Dec 2009 06:50 pm
Please explain gingerbread houses to me
I don’t quite get it. I like gingerbread houses and one of these days, I swear to myself, I’ll make one just for the minor engineering challenge of it all. But they do confuse me a bit.
I mean, do you actually eat such a thing? It seems to me that by the time you’re ready to eat it, it’s probably gone stale. (I suppose you could pick the gumdrops off, assuming you can pry them loose.) So you’ve just made a celebration of sweetness that you won’t actually eat. That seems a little daft.
on 13 Dec 2009 at 6:58 pm 1.Arjache said …
I suppose I think of them as roughly equivalent to decorating a cake with fondant. Yes, you technically /could/ eat the fondant, but…
Though, now that I think about it, I think I once did have some stale gingerbread from a house and it was marvelous. I’m just not sure how old it was.
on 13 Dec 2009 at 7:18 pm 2.Tamara said …
I grew up in Germany, near the Black Forest, and it was sort of a Hansel and Gretel thing. We made one every year, but only a few days before xmas, and I love ginger anything - bread, cookies, drinks. We would eat it, and it was great helping out when we were kids to decorate it.
on 13 Dec 2009 at 7:31 pm 3.Wim said …
I eat ‘em. I have a vague notion that the gingerbread used for houses is supposed to become a bit stale before it is at its most delicious.
on 13 Dec 2009 at 10:08 pm 4.desolina said …
We went to a party last year where there was a gingerbread house building contest, except that instead of gingerbread we used graham crackers. We almost won for our rendering of the twin towers complete with gumdrop planes, candy corn flames and crying American eagles. Unfortunately we were nosed out be a guy who built a pretty fair replica of “Falling Water”. Dang that Frank Lloyd Wright!
on 13 Dec 2009 at 10:15 pm 5.Cam Sculpin said …
Crying American eagles?! Do you have any photos?
on 13 Dec 2009 at 10:20 pm 6.Amanda said …
When I make a gingerbread house, part of the rules is that it has to be totally edible. We experimented with a number of gingerbread recipes over the years before evolving one that was sturdy yet yummy.
So, yeah, we did eat ours. Staleness wasn’t really much of an issue with construction-grade gingerbread.
on 14 Dec 2009 at 12:14 am 7.desolina said …
My brother might have one somewhere. Both the eagle and our firefighter were made out of gumdrops, I think. We sharpied the tears on the eagle.
on 14 Dec 2009 at 5:33 am 8.Ms. Danson said …
When I was a kid we made a gingerbread house before Christmas as a decoration. It wasn’t at all edible (which didn’t stop us from trying to eat it) but that wasn’t the point. The point was that on New Years Day we would get together with our friends and beat the house into a sugary pulp. It was an orgy of parentally condoned violence that was very satisfying.
on 14 Dec 2009 at 11:35 am 9.naomi said …
For me, during childhood, staleness was always trumped by coolness.
on 14 Dec 2009 at 3:10 pm 10.Rechercher said …
My favorite gingerbread is nice and soft, but gingerbread houses are much more like gingersnaps. And personally I can’t tell a stale gingersnap from a fresh one. In any case, you don’t want to have your gingerbread house around more than a week or two. Like sand castles, there is as much fun in destroying as creating.