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Not As Easy as I had hoped.

The raw building material.

But about as easy as I expected – namely not easy at all.

I’m working on a side-hustle, trying to exploit all my hard-won knowledge surrounding cooking, baking, making YouTube videos…

I cook every day. I bake… Rarely… I make YouTube videos even more infrequently but that is more because of the astonishing amount of work that goes into producing an even half-good video rather than my inability to get things shipped out the door.

The side hustle is a series of videos on making gingerbread houses and selling templates for the houses. I don’t plan on making much money from it, but I do want to learn more about e-commerce, sales, production, that sort of thing. Photography hasn’t been that busy recently and I wanted to fill in the cracks with something a little different.

I won’t be set up for this Christmas, but that’s ok. I can only move so quickly on this project and I certainly don’t want to make too many (expensive, time consuming mistakes)

But I have made a few mistakes. It hasn’t been easy, this project. Harder than I expected, actually.

  • Editing video, especially if you’re not very good at it, takes a long time.
  • Being a perfectionist also slows one down, somewhat
  • Learning as you go isn’t too bad unless there is a camera rolling and you say one thing and then quickly learn that it isn’t quite what you thought.
  • YouTube puts videos without any context or help at the absolute bottom of the heap.
  • There is a lot to learn, a lot to do and a lot to re-do and re-do yet again until it works, somewhat.
  • And there is a lot more to go.

I was wondering this afternoon if it was all worthwhile. I have no idea, but so far it has been interesting, if nothing else. For now I’ll keep going.

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Gingerbread. And gingerbread houses

A team effort, if ever there was one.

My mother loves ginger. I’m rather lukewarm about it. I’m more appreciative these days but for years I was no fan.

For my mom, candied ginger, this ginger, that ginger – everything goes… If a recipe calls for ginger she’ll add twice what is called for.

She has been making gingerbread from the same recipe, year after year. I’m not sure where the actual recipe is from, but given that we have made about a zillion batches of gingerbread, I’m going to say it’s an old family recipe.

And it is great. Best gingerbread on the planet if I do say so, myself. Or if I say so for her benefit. Every other time I have had gingerbread it has lacked something. No idea what, but it doesn’t matter. Mom’s gingerbread rocks and however she does it – the ginger is exactly the right amount.

There is more, though. Her gingerbread is structural as long as you cook it long enough for it to get a bit crunchy. It holds together in house-form perfectly.

So that said, about 20 years ago mom started doing gingerbread houses for her kids (us) and our cousins. I always thought that everyone did gingerbread houses like ours – you know, built like a bunker and perfect for decorating with zillions of candies. Then, once the candies had all been pried off, the gingerbread was there for the eating. It does get a bit stale but every year there doesn’t seem to be much left no matter how dry the air in the house might be.

This year she decided that this year would be her last year to build the houses. I don’t blame her, as it’s a lot of work. She did, however, go out in style, making 11 houses for all the young relatives. Quite the swan song.

Now, I would be remiss in not mentioning that the gingerbread house creative process is a team effort. My mom makes the dough and crafts the pieces for the houses; my dad takes care of quality control in the form of sampling the off-cuts and he is in charge of trimming the slabs and gluing the houses together.

He uses melted sugar. It hardens like hard candy and it’ll hold slabs of gingerbread in perfect harmony even with a couple pounds of gummy bears and icing. What is more, it’ll stand for days on end. The only drawback is that things get a bit sticky when you’re demolishing the house, but that sort of goes with the territory.

They have a system set up, honed from years of practice. How long to bake the gingerbread slabs; how to fix any breaks; how to trim to size; how to assemble properly and not burn yourself… It’s a rather impressive process.

Now we just have to get them to write it down so we don’t lose the technique. It’s golden. Best gingerbread and best gingerbread houses around made with love from a great team.

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Her favourite flavour is strawberry.

Doreen, with her strawberry ice cream.

I was asked to photograph Doreen McKenzie Sanders quite some time ago. She was, by this time, in her 80s and she was a delight to spend the afternoon with. I’m not sure who had the idea of photographing her with an ice cream cone – the store was a regular haunt with her, it would turn out – maybe she had the idea.

The shoot was fine – one of my best images came from it that day. It’s still in my portfolio easily 15 years later.

…but I want to talk about the ice cream for a moment. I want to talk about how we all have our favourites. When we went to shoot Doreen had the strawberry she is pictured with here. In fact, we had to have 2 cones to finish the shoot. She was allowed to eat the second one. Strawberry has never been my favourite ice cream flavour. Not by a long shot. I like strawberries and everything, but more in the context of breakfast. My ice cream choices are either salted caramel or raspberry cheesecake. My older daughter, who actually works in an ice cream store, would gag at those flavours, while chomping on Mango. My wife might agree with my older daughter, unless there is hazelnut in the store. My younger daughter? Well, when she was younger it was bubblegum. Now I’m not sure.

Regardless. We all have our favourites. And we are all convinced that our favourite is the best and that all the others pale in comparison. Food can be like that. Heck, life is like that but at least with food it’s generally a lot less problematic.

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