Comments on: Please explain gingerbread houses to me

By: Rechercher

Rechercher — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:10:33 +0000

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.

By: naomi

naomi — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:35:24 +0000

For me, during childhood, staleness was always trumped by coolness.

By: Ms. Danson

Ms. Danson — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:33:33 +0000

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.

By: desolina

desolina — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:14:33 +0000

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.

By: Amanda

Amanda — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:20:21 +0000

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.

By: Cam Sculpin

Cam Sculpin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:15:00 +0000

Crying American eagles?! Do you have any photos?

By: desolina

desolina — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:08:56 +0000

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!

By: Wim

Wim — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 03:31:18 +0000

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.

By: Tamara

Tamara — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 03:18:25 +0000

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.

By: Arjache

Arjache — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 02:58:00 +0000

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.