Gingerbread Houses
Started: 2022-12-18 19:08:21
Submitted: 2022-12-18 20:49:36
Visibility: World-readable
Decorating with candy for the holidays
As part of our winter seasonal holiday observances this year, we made gingerbread houses, using graham crackers as the structural elements instead of actual gingerbread so we didn't have to actually bake the walls in advance.
Using graham crackers proved troublesome, because the individual crackers were far more brittle than any of us were prepared for. Some of the large pieces snapped down the middle as I picked them up and tried to decorate them; I glued them back together with frosting and hoped for the best. We ended up with a large pile of small pieces of graham crackers in a bowl in the middle of the table, some of which I was eventually able to reuse for smaller elements in my design. (The whole experience reminded me of trying to cut small porcelain tiles — about the same size and shape as a graham cracker — while working on the shower in Wallingford, an experience I am not eager to repeat.)
I based my creation on the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse, the eponymous lighthouse at Lighthouse Point (and icon of the City of Santa Cruz), housing the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum. I started with the main building first, which was easy enough to decorate (with strawberry candy standing in for brick), but as soon as I tried to assemble the walls I discovered that the frosting I was using as glue had a drying time longer than I was prepared to wait. (This seems like a hard trade-off to make: one doesn't want the frosting to harden immediately on most surfaces, but perhaps one needs special fast-setting structural frosting. Presumably such a thing exists and we just didn't look very hard. Kiesa picked up a bunch of pre-mixed colored frosting in squeeze tubes that were easy to use and worked with the various sizes of nozzles she had, but it didn't give us the opportunity to make different choices for setting time for different purposes.)
I eventually put an extra horizontal beam at the top of the walls, making the base of a triangle with the roof, to function as a tie rod, providing extra stability to keep the walls from falling apart. This was good enough that I could proceed with my construction, but only after both walls had fallen down at least once and one of my back windows was smudged because I had used it to grab the wall as it was falling and the frosting was still tacky.
I didn't end up making the main lighthouse tower as tall as it needed to be, but I didn't have any confidence that I could get the graham crackers to stand up as tall as they would need to be. I used red ropes to stand in for the railing and panes around the window, and peppermint candies for the light itself. It was not a perfect match for the real lighthouse but it got the idea across.
While we worked I imagined myself in a Great British Baking Show show-stopper segment where I explained the idea and then we saw an animated version of my design. But our ability to match execution to goals seemed to more closely resemble Nailed It! so as we were wrapping up the construction I played the first act of a holiday episode. We, at least, did better at our decorations than the contestants did on theirs.
Kiesa made a house she titled "1 million dollar SF house (sold as-is)". From the front the house looks ok but in the back the wall is clearly caving in, and the roof fell off several times during construction. One piece of wall was left abandoned inside the house, where it fell during construction and could not be retrieved. The house was inspired by our experience looking at expensive houses in hot coastal housing markets at a time when half of the houses on the market seemed to be about to fall over (or maybe just electrocute unsuspecting visitors) but were still listing for (and, usually, selling for) around a million dollars.
Calvin built some sort of fortification to be used in a zombie apocalypse. He spent most of his time filing down pieces of graham cracker into tiny fragments, then gluing them together in a fortification. He attempted to build an awning supported by red vines, but it turned out that the red vines did not have very much compression strength, so they were repurposed in his final design.
Julian decided to skip the house part and focus on the cookie part; this meant he only had to decorate his graham crackers and didn't have to worry about the tensile strength of the graham crackers or the holding power of the frosting. All he had to do was glue candies to the crackers with frosting, and then he was done and watched the rest of us struggle with our more-complicated structures. Julian decided that he had made "decorative super-yummy cookies" and that, unlike the house, they were "not for sale".
We put the completed houses in the China cabinet so we could keep them on display without worrying that our cat Rio might get into them, adding a bit of festive holiday decorations to our lives.
