Some Afterthoughts

Now that the project is finished, we can take some time to put down some afterthoughts and lessons learned. Lisa and myself will also be going through the posts and adding a little more detail regarding quantities and exact ingredients used. If there's anything we missed, just comment and we'll get back to you.

1. Dough thickness - From what I've seen, our dough came particularly thick when baked. Being my first gingerbread house I didn't see the problem, but other people have constantly told me its out of the norm and that it should be much thinner. The recipe we used said to spread out the dough at a quarter inch, which is what we did, so I'm not really disappointed. The advantage of thick walls is more stability, and less time needed to assemble as they stick quick easily and stay in place quicker.

2. The base - In retrospect I wouldn't go through all the hassle of a base again, unless it was a really heavily terrained one with valleys and rivers. For simple rivers or lakes the easy way would be to just spread icing on the surface of a flat base. The effect won't be bad.

3.The christmas tree. We're very please with this, but my worry is how edible it is. Since its just an ice cream cone and icing, it might be too sweet to actually enjoy eating. An idea that came to mind this morning was to first cover the cone in nutella before putting on the green and red icing. This will give it some good taste that's not just sugar and at the same time make the tree look more bulky and help the icing stick to it. Problem with nutella is it doesn't really dry, so I'll have to think about that.

Anyone else has anything?

Finished Product!!

Here are the photos of the finished product, with snow and all...

Day 4 - More finishing touches

First job was to continue on yesterday's tree, which dried well by now. With some red icing we tried to put a winding tinsel around the tree. It wasn't easy but we got there...

The next step was to put some more icing on the house roofs to simulate icicles

Day 3 - Finishing Touches

Though we were very pleased with yesterday's outcome, there was something still off. The village didn't seem to have enough color balance, or christmassy colors. Also we wanted to do something about the river.Our attempt to use MnM's had failed to yield a nice effect, so now we started thinking about using food coloring with the icing.

I watered it down a bit to make it a bit more flowing, and gave it a blue tint. Here's the result..

The next project was a Tree. We got this idea of using an ice cream cone and getting it to look like a tree with green colored icing. When the icing was on, the tree looked very flat, as the icing was one whole flat surface. I got a toothpick and starting picking at the icing to bring out the effect of leaves. Had to do this around every 20 mins as the icing was drying to keep the effect up. Some photos...

In the meantime, we used the green icing to decorate the village a bit more, mostly with tinsel. Used the same technique to get the icing to look like strands of tinsel. Anyway after a night of decorating, this is where we are thus far...

Decorating

Once all the pieces were baked, we could start some assembly. But first, loads and loads of icing to be made...

Assembly is the fun bit. You just use the icing as mortar and start putting the pieces together. One word of caution though. Since the baked pieces warp when they grow, its advisable to cut them to straight edges to ease fixing them together. I was hesitant about using a serrated knife as the recipe says, because I thought the gingerbread would be a biscuity type. But it turns out it cuts pretty nicely and you get a clean straight edge. 

Here are some photos of the assembly and decorating process. I think we did quite well...

Baking..

Once all the pieces were cut. We baked them for 15 mins at 175 C, or 350 F. You can see the pieces grow a bit which is why it's important to leave some spacing between the pieces on the tray. Having said that, I've read that some recipes don't result in expanding pieces. Lisa told me it's because of the baking soda we added as part of the recipe we followed, so I'm taking her word for it.

Finishing the Base

One of our dilemmas was how to cover the base in a nice surface that wasn't foil. The solution was to go for fondant, but since none was to be found we bough ready made icing paste to roll out and use as our fondant cover. 

After some trouble rolling out a sheet big enough to cover our aluminium, cork and wood base, we found it was easier to transfer the whole thing onto the base with baking paper and all, rather than try to roll it off the baking paper and onto the base.

The result was quite satisfying...

House and bridge templates

This morning before shopping I started designing some templates for the buildings we need. 3 houses and a bridge, with the bridge being the more complex.

While I was working on the base, Lisa had started using the house templates I made to cut out the dough into the pieces we need. We're going to bake walls for 2 houses at the first go, and see how it comes. Roofs and the other house will be on the next bake.

Making the base

Starting work on the base. First covering the cork board with aluminium foil, just to be neat...

Finished foiling..

Now I need to cut the cork tiles into the terrain we want for the landscape. The idea is to have a river running through the middle of the scene. So two levels of cork tiles should do it. Some measuring and templating ...

Cork cutting done...

Now cutting the river

Next step is to lay foil before sticking the cork pieces on. The reason for this is to have a nice foil side.

Using a paintbrush to spread the glue out evenly.

Day 2 - Back to Work

So now it's Dave's turn to work some magic and put is crafting skills to good use. We've gone out and bought a cork board as a base (frame included) and some pieces of cork for crafting shapes and such. We've also decided to cover the landscape in fondant to give that look of 'snow' so we took the easy way out and bought icing paste ready.

Here's a photo of supplies we have so far. Basically cork board, some cork tiles to create the landscape with. Wood glue, foil, masking tape for creating mock ups, cardboard, ruler, craft knife, pencil and scissors...

Hopefully this won't be a disaster as it's Sunday and very few places will be open should we need any more supplies. Fingers crossed!