{"id":565,"date":"2020-12-11T14:01:41","date_gmt":"2020-12-11T22:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/?p=565"},"modified":"2020-12-11T14:01:43","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T22:01:43","slug":"gingerbread-and-gingerbread-houses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/?p=565","title":{"rendered":"Gingerbread. And gingerbread houses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A team effort, if ever there was one.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

My mother loves ginger. I’m rather lukewarm about it. <\/a>I’m more appreciative these days but for years I was no fan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,12,72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-food","category-sweet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":571,"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions\/571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dontcrowdthepan.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}