Well there it is folks. This year’s house of bread and ginger.
My mum made the slabs this year (we bought them ready-made last year and put them together) . She found a template on the net, printed it out and then duly measured and cut each piece carefully and precisely only to have the gingerbread change shape during cooking. Some bits shrunk. Some got bigger. And then the icing I made to hold it all together that was supposed to be thick and sticky was neither.
The result was a wonky, precarious house that had mum and I in gales of laughter.
However, in true Christmas fashion, it all turned out allright in the end.
There was a massive gap where the roof slabs should have aligned, walls sticking out all over the place and a heavily (some might say dangerously) bowed roof on one side. The Gingerbread Construction Authority (GCA) , had they come across it, would have slapped a condemned sticker on.
The icing took forever to set and I thought my mum was going to have to stand in our kitchen and actually hold it together herself until Christmas day. So it was a relief, for her in particular as she actually had other plans for the following week, when the icing finally hardened.
We had a ball decorating our little crooked house and I was impressed with the weight that the roof was actually able to bear despite its outward appearance (that’s a life lesson if ever I heard one). In the end, I think it looks pretty spectacular.
My Dad might be the one with the engineering degree and a masters thesis in concrete stress fractures, but I’ll be looking to my mum over him for construction advice from now on.
In future I may instead make gorgeous houses like this, this and this. And they will look fab. But I bet we don’t get quite as many laughs along the way.
Anyone else been building?
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