Candy Cane Construction Ltd.

If you're anything like me, e.g curious and slightly bemused, you might have seen the most amazing gingerbread houses in the shops and then wondered why they ask so much for them. Hence why I decided to make my own gingerbread house this year, and discovered within five minutes why they demand such a high price; a) if you don't have lots of bakery goods in your house, it'll cost you around £20 to make a house with your own fair hands anyway, and b) they are bloody difficult to make. To be honest this post comes a bit early, and the house isn't finished yet, but I'm impatient and I can always add more delicious looking posts of the house as it nears completion. If you're a boring old fart and don't want to read about my trials in making the house, you can look at the recipe online here. And if you have severe difficulties in contemplating how anyone could create, let alone eat, a fantastically fattening house that contains gallons of sweeties and tons of butter and sugar, I suggest you don't read on.
Now for those who have stuck with me in reading this mundane but salivatingly good post, I'll tell you now I'm no cook. Everyone who knows me knows I'm an awful cook; the only thing I seemed to have perfected so far is home made chunky chips, and let's be honest, a life time of chunky chips isn't going to lend itself well if I want a life time in couture. Couture just doesn't accommodate thighs. Or any vaguely rounded flesh. Or anything, really, that isn't pointy and boney and skeletal. Anyway, I digress... so I'm not quite sure why I suddenly took it upon myself to create a gingerbread house. I hate Christmas cake, so it's nice to have a festive cakey option for me this year as I love gingerbread. My search started with the cook books in the house, to no avail, so I turned to trusty google. The first recipe I looked at warned how difficult a gingerbread house is to make, before even going into the ingredients or the where's and why's, so I clicked away immediately and found a recipe that didn't give me a foreboding commentary.
Any other blog readers have snow today? Uh huh, me too. So I had to set off, in my little car which I haven't driven for months (watch out pedestrians, I'm mounting a curb near YOU) and headed out to buy ingredients with TWO pairs of shoes, which clearly means this was a serious trip (I can't for the life of me drive in Hunters, and Uggs aren't snow proof). Back with my shopping bags, I started to mix!

First went the dry ingredients into the Kitchen Aid, whilst I started to stir the butter, sugar and syrup on the Aga so it made a really scrummy treacley sticky gooey sweet sugary yummy gloop. Mmm.

Oh and by the way, yes I did document all my processes using my BlackBerry camera. I'm terrified my little house will fall apart and I'll have nothing to show for my herculean efforts, so feast your eyes on the pictures!

Out came the goo and it was mega greasy, I've made gingerbread men before and never known a dough to be soooo sticky and greasy, so I was a bit concerned, but the dough set nice and hard. I had to make little templates for the bits of the house, which was a complete pain because you're really proud of your dough shapes, you pop them in the oven and then POOF ten minutes later, they're baked and distorted!

ANYWAYS. So then I had to wait for them to cool, and then I could finally put the walls together.

Note the crazed cat in the background. Don't worry, she's gone no where near the house, despite her unnerving interest. I think she'd quite like a bit of icing.

I am using icing for glue, so to speak, to keep all the gingerbread walls together. Now I have to wait three hours for them to set, and then I can put the roof on, and it won't be until tomorrow that I am able to decorate it! I'm so impatient. I baked a little gingerbread man to inhabit the house, and made him an Xmas tree too, so I was able to decorate them to keep myself busy, but I'm so desperate to decorate it now!! Fingers crossed it doesn't fall apart....