Gingerbread House Rules

We don't believe in taking Gingerbread houses too seriously. When things go wrong in the construction process as they always do we simply say "It's a gingerbread house! We can always eat our mistakes!"

This house, like all gingerbread houses had it's share of mishaps. The most serious was when the entire Santa wall fell over and hit a bowl of frosting and broke in two right through Santa's window!


Oh! NO! said the little one! Oh! NO! But we all laughed and got some more frosting glue and in a snap the wall was back in place. Not a problem and everyone laughed.

There are some rules we follow:
Rule 1:
We won't use crazy glue unless there is no other way to save the day (because we want to think we can eat the house).



Rule 2:
Everything in the house must be edible stuff, but we did make an exception for the Pez container Santa and some of the wrapped candy (see rule 3).

Rule 3:
Gingerbread house rules are made to be broken.




Rule 4:
Decorations should be done by the youngest people around.

Rule 5:
Gingerbread House rules should be made up as you go along.

We wanted the house to have some bells and whistles so we made some stained glass windows out of melted candycanes.

Had we thought this through in advance we'd have made the windows along with the walls during the baking process the same way we make stained glass cookies, but we didn't think that part through in advance. We were far too busy deciding on an authentic American design for the structure of the house. After days of research we chose the Saltbox, in fact we chose a specific saltbox house from New England that might have been built by an ancestor, but in any case was built by a person who has exactly the same name as one of us. That seemed to be a most appropriate choice, at least to our team leader who is, by virtue of being in the 2nd Grade, our final authority.

The house we chose was very grand. As we worked out the pattern it became clear that we'd need three, count them THREE, batches of gingerbread dough to build the structure and it would need internal reinforcement or the roof would certainly collapse. In keeping with Rule 5 we redesigned the house to fit one batch of dough and just stayed with the general saltbox shape.


Rule 6:
Gingerbread house frosting takes more sugar than the recipe calls for!

We ate a lot of this stuff, mostly off our fingers. Milk is a good antidote for the taste of frosting glue. A good scrubbing gets the green off your teeth so that when you appear for public engagements you don't look like a deranged elf.



Rule 7:
Ignore what purists would tell you about just placing the cookie walls into frosting and letting them support each other! Build a foundation of sugar cube bricks inside and out and cement the walls to that.

If you need support in front, as we did, you can call them columns. Our young architectural expert knows that saltboxes don't have columns, but at the same time we all wanted the walls to stand up, not fall down (again).

Rule 8:
Decorating the Gingerbread house will take at least twice as long and a lot more frosting than you imagine it will.

We made the dough weeks in advance, made the cookies a couple days in advance and put the house together in one day, leaving the yard for another. However, our shopper left buying the candy for the last minute and almost didn't get tiny candy canes, on the other hand a lot of the candy was marked down due to the closeness to Christmas.

Taking the team leader on the shopping trip is risky. Team leaders are well known for their sweet tooth!

Rule 9:
Gingerbread houses are supposed to be over the top, so keep decorating until you are satisfied or, more likely simply exhausted!

Feel free to run the Food Network while you are working, good ideas might pop up. Our fearless team leader saw the ice cream cone Christmas trees on a cooking show and incorporated them in the project within minutes. (See Rules 3, 5 and 10)

We needed a "water feature" since this is 'The Banks of Red Stream', so a pond was constructed out of, what else!, peppermint candies.
Hereabouts the water is red.

We just kept adding whatever we had till we were done. The truck was a great idea, but of course it needed a driver.












Rule 10:
Play Christmas music and sing and dance while working. The TV should be shut off. (see Rule 3 and 5... this is about having fun not consistency!)

Dancing can break off pieces of the decorations, but that is why you make lots of frosting glue. After all all the trees in nature aren't the same height and not all of them have pointy tops.

Rule 11:
Unless you have a very large kitchen, plan to order pizza or something.

Our poor cook had to attempt a ham dinner with all the trimmings without disturbing the builders. The cook seemed to feel that the builders' request for a ham dinner that night showed poor judgment! The builders, on the other hand, were very grateful to have fresh vegetables and protein rich food to counteract all the sugar and candy that somehow escaped into their mouths.

Rule 11:

Take a tour. Get out the camera, if you haven't already and take close ups of your creation.

Merry Christmas to All!

And to All a Good Night!

Ice Storm

The storm was supposed to bring 5 or 6 inches of snow on top of the 4 or 5 inches we already had, but during the night the storm crossed into warm air and a gentle rain fell instead, freezing on everything it touched, and passing on before the layers of ice were thick enough to crush the trees.

Morning rush hour was a nightmare for those that had to go out. Fortunately we didn't have anywhere to be until after the sun and salt had cleared the roads. Of course the drive to the road was interesting, since neither sun nor salt ever touches that part of the trip.

Although it was cold enough to freeze rain to ice, out back on the river, the water is still flowing.

At sunset the ice was still clinging to the trees, a glittering end to the day.

Second Snow

We had two snowfalls right after one another. The temperature didn't really go up much above freezing between the two so there was a bit of accumulation. Generally we would not see this much snow until January. It certainly is unusual for the snow to fall this early and still be on the ground a few days later. Not only that but the temperature stayed below freezing all day today, making it feel like February.

I guess it is a good bet that we'll have a white Christmas. The kids will be happy.

A blue heron is almost perfectly camouflaged
near the log in the canal. This picture is slightly out of focus, but sharp eyes can find the heron.

Fungi Memories

I'm no fan of snow. When I was a kid I loved snow, deep white snow drifting over the garage next to our house high in the Adirondacks. Snow drifts so high that a kid could climb up them and over the peaked roof of the garage and slide down the other side on a cushion of snow 2 feet thick. The great thrill came in flying off the roof on the lee side into open air for a couple of feet before making a soft landing in an 8 foot drift so fluffy that the sheer force of landing might put me under the white stuff. Then I could lie there for a long minute looking through the blue light of made by a couple inches of snow before emerging into the sunshine.

I loved snow. Snow so wonderfully deep in the cornfield that we would make tunnels in it tall enough for 8 year olds to walk upright under the crusty frozen top layers, our own winter underground that seemed so far from the world of the grownups, yet was just outside my Aunt's kitchen window.

I loved snow. Snow glistening blue diamonds in the moonlight, soft hills of snow and a gloss of frost coating the trees which creaked and moaned as they seemed to voice their displeasure at a cruel fate which left them to shiver at 20 below.

I loved snow. Snow of a perfect density and moisture content to build a jolly white giant of a snowman standing on two legs in the front yard, with a slide made of ice between his legs for my children to go slipping and sliding down the hill.

I hate snow. Around here the snow is seldom deep enough to cover the leaves and sticks so they stick out looking somehow ragged and dirty in the white cover. On the rare occasions when the snow blankets everything in deep pure white all it means to me is that I'll have to shovel a quarter mile of driveway unless the temperature goes up drastically and fast.

It snowed today for the second time this week. The snow has a miserable thinness which makes the woods look bleak and forlorn. It was a good day to think of mushrooms. I could think of green leaves and flowers but that would leave me with a terrible yearning for summer, and it is way too early for that. I could think of the warm colors of autumn, but the pain of raking all those leaves has still not left my bones.

So I think of mushrooms. We have beautiful mushrooms and we have mushrooms that look like old boots, I've never seen such mushrooms. They remind me in their variety and changeability of the snow of my childhood. One day a mushroom is purple, the next it is pink then it is gone. Others spread like "The Blob" threatening to devour our car, our cats... us!

"The Blob" appeared one May day in 2003. At first I thought that perhaps someone had dropped an old boot in the yard, but it grew and grew, soon others appeared. I have no idea what "The Blob" really is. It came back in 2004 but there was no sign of it or its kin in 2005. Will it come again, will it eat the car?

As the pictures of mushrooms came in from the yard I began to see a world under my feet that in the previous years had been invisible to me. The cameraman's eye was revealing a universe as unknowable to me as the Adironack snow.



If the truth be told I like them better in pictures than in real life. They squish in a most unpleasant way when stepped on, and stepping on one is a common occurrence when walking through the yard.

Some look like flowers, some look like ears. I don't know the names of any of them, I've looked up as many as I could find, but their names don't stay with me.

Down there on the ground there are gorgeous green ruffles on thick stems that make me wonder when they appear why I would want to plant anything that might push them out of their habitat.

This might be a chrysanthemum.

These are as bright as any summer flower.

The black mushrooms are both exotic and ugly at the same time. My cameraman tells me that these "might" be a little rare, and are not edible, not that we are about to try.

I think of those that grow on the firewood as nuisances... who would want to burn this!

The pink ones don't last long, maybe something likes to eat them. As they get pinker they get more ragged, by the time they are dark purple most of the edges are gone.

Mushrooms can be dwarfed by a pinecone or they can be just plain weird looking. I don't know if this funny white thing was partially eaten or if this is how it really looks.

Supposedly Indian Pipes are not really mushrooms. I've heard this and should check it out. It doesn't matter, though, what they are; because for me Indian Pipes mean Spring. They marked the end of winter for sure. When I was a kid they meant that I could trade my ice skates for a swimming suit. Now they mean that I can trade my snow shovel for a rake. How sad it is to grow up.