Gingerbread House

I had very mixed feelings about this months challenge both excitement and dread.  At first I was really excited to make my first gingerbread house from scratch.  I had all these lofty ideas of recreating a famous building from here in Vancouver, but that was very short lived.  After a few weeks of thinking I finally decided to make the dough and that was when I realized maybe I should be a bit more realistic.

Over the first couple weeks of December I was following along with others that were having problems with the dough, which wasn’t very encouraging.  I was convinced that mine was going to work out great.  As I put the wet ingredients together in my kitchenaid I was feeling pretty good, that was until I saw that the recipe called for 9 cups of flour!  How did I miss that?  I don’t even have 9 cups of white flour, so I ended up using 4 cups of whole wheat flour as well.

As you can see from the picture, there was so much flour, I was pretty skeptical that all of that flour was going to fit in my mixer.  As I began adding the flour I realized half way through that I was in trouble, there was no way it was all going to mix with the little amount of liquid the recipe called for.  And it definitely wasn’t going to fit in my mixer.  I found myself going back to the recipe to make sure that I had included everything.  Sure enough I had, but goodness it is so dry.

I decided the only way to mix it all together was to move the wet ingredients to the large bowl the flour was in and just mix it with my hands.  A word of advise though would be to take off your rings before you start doing that, I was left with some very messy rings.

After finally getting the dough mixed together I again was skeptical that it was going to stay together enough to actually roll out.  Anna assured everyone that after you let it rest in the fridge for 4 hours it comes together, so that is what I did.  After 4 hours of resting in the fridge I was a bit discouraged because it was just as dry as when I put it in the fridge.  I decided to just go ahead and freeze the dough and deal with it the following weekend.

Thankfully over the week that I waited to tackle the dough again, many more of my fellow Daring Baker’s had tried different things and came up with some great solutions for the dry dough.  Come to find out that it was better to weigh the dough than to use it by volume.

After thawing my dough I added a bit more whipping cream, kneaded it a bit and it was ready to be rolled out.  Since I scaled back my plan I definitely didn’t need all the dough that was made so unfortunately I ended up tossing half of the dough.  If I was to do this again I would plan a little better and make a half recipe instead.

Thanks again to more of my fellow Daring Baker’s suggestions I rolled out the dough between pieces of saran wrap and then cut them while on pieces of parchment so that I didn’t have to move them after cutting.

At this point in the process I was kind of just ready to be done but I pushed ahead to make some royal icing while the gingerbread was cooking so I could start assembling.  After the gingerbread cooled a bit I was ready to assemble which surprisingly was done in record time.

After 20 minutes or so I had a finished gingerbread house that didn’t look too stable, probably because I put it up so quick.  If I was to do this again I would do it with another person, it is just a bit boring to do all these steps an sit there and decorate alone, I should have had my husband make one too.

The end result was a cute gingerbread house that my husband almost immediately started eating after taking the pictures.

2 1/2 cups packed dark brown sugar

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

1 1/4 cup molasses

9 1/2 cups all purpose flour

2 tablespoons baking soda

1 tablespoons ground ginger

In a very large bowl, with wire wisk, beat frown sugar, cream, and molasses until sugar lumps dissolve and mixture is smooth.  In medium bowl, combine flour, baking soda and ginger.  With spoon, stir flour mixture into cream mixture in 3 additions until dough is too stiff to stir, then knead with hands until all the flour is incorporated and dough is smooth.

Divide dough into 4 equal parts, flatten each into a disk to speed chilling.  Wrap each disk well in plastic wrap and refridgerate atleast 4 hours until doug is firm enough to roll.

Roll out dough, 1 disk at a time between two pieces of plastic wrap and cut into desired shapes.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees

Chill for 10 minutes prior to baking if the dough seems soft.  Bake for 25-30 minutes until pieces are firm to the touch, do not over bake.

Tags: Daring Bakers, Gingerbread

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Baking, Daring Bakers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.