Gingerbread Fun

When I was little, we never built gingerbread houses.  Instead my mom would build a beautiful castle out of sugar cubes, icing, and candy. 

This is the castle my mom would copy each year.  She originally found the idea in a Pillsbury Holiday cookbook.

While the sugar cube castles always turned out to be quite spectacular, I had always wanted to build a gingerbread house.  Thanks to the fine people at The Kitchen At, I was able to do that earlier this month. 

Located on Xiangyan Nan Lu, The Kitchen At... holds all kinds of cooking classes.

During the gingerbread house workshop, we built a gingerbread house from scratch with our new German friends.

Some sweet German kiddos built houses with us.

The adventure started with 150 g of butter at room temperature.  (That is about 1 1/2 sticks)

Then Chis smashed the butter with 500 g of cake flour.

Then we stirred in 1 tbsp ginger powder, 1 tbsp cinnamon, 1 g of clove, 1 tsp of baking soda, and 225 g of light soft brown sugar.

Then I beat 112g of golden syrup and 80g eggs into the flower/butter mixture.

Chris had a blast getting his hands dirty.

We then split the dough in three balls. 

After we had our dough balls, we started goofing around in the kitchen.  After they were juggled, the dough balls were refrigerated for 30 minutes and we cut out our house template.

We weren't the only ones who decided to monkey around.

After the dough was cool, we rolled it out and we cut out the and baked the frame of the house.
(Bake 8-10 Min at 200C)

While the house was baking and cooling, our friends played with a little leftover raw dough.    They called the raw dough gingerbread poop.  The youngest kiddo decided to eat a little of the poop.  His sister then spent the next 20 minutes singing, "N ate the poop!  N ate the poop!"

After the sides were cooled, we assembled the house with icing.  (450 g icing sugar  and 1-2 egg whites)

The kids brought out our inner goofiness.

After the sides were constructed, it was time to decorate the roof.

We decided to decorate our house with a snowball chic theme.

The almost finished product...

A few days after the workshop, I walked the gingerbread house three blocks back to my apartment.  I am happy to report despite the lack of covering, it arrived in one piece!

I was so relieved to get the house home in one piece.

The great thing about The Kitchen At is they have many different western and Chinese cooking classes.  They also hold summer cooking camps for kids.  I can’t wait to take a dumpling class there in a few weeks.  Bon Apetit!

For more information on The Kitchen At, click here.