Baking off pieces of a gingerbread house is no different than making cookies, the only difference is size. The main difficulty, when it comes to shapes that are 8″ x 10″ or larger, is transferring them from point A to point B. Just use plenty of flour and check as you roll to see if […]
READ ONThese days ginger is so abundant that it can be found everywhere from convenience stores to expensive spice boutiques. For a basic gingerbread cookie, most any ginger will work. However, should you wish to up the ante quality-wise, locate some Jamaican ginger, which as a rule has a more delicate and sweeter flavor than Chinese […]
READ ONMaking a paper template for your gingerbread house may sound like an obsessive, fussy sort of thing to do. But trust me, there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to assemble a house out of planks of gingerbread that aren’t made to fit together. No amount of icing can make up for bad design, friends. Plus […]
READ ONYou can, reader Ginger, if that IS your real name, though you probably don’t want to. The reason: because fresh ginger doesn’t provide as much “ginger” flavor as the dry stuff. You’d think it would since fresh ginger contains more gingerol compounds, and those are closely related to capsaicin (found in chile peppers) and pepperine […]
READ ONAs I mentioned below, American gingerbread is informed by at least two major gingerbread archetypes: shortbread-like English/Scottish gingerbread and crispy, cookie-like German gingerbread. Although judging from the sheer variety of gingerbread I’ve come across over the years, we’ve probably inherited several others too. This page from The Boston Cook Book demonstrates just how varied gingerbread […]
READ ONUnknown. However food historians do have a fairly good idea of where and when the gingerbread house became popular: in Germany in the early 1800’s, not long after the Grimm Brothers published their collection of fairy tales. The particular tale that made those houses so popular was of course Hansel and Gretel. Apparently, in the […]
READ ONFinding someone else to blame for my own stupid behavior is a consuming pass time of mine. Only this time there’s no way to deny that the reason the site was down this morning is because I forgot to pay my URL registration fees. Which means that any of you who tried to get onto […]
READ ONRoyal icing is a go-to building material for cake decorators, as it’s indispensable for detail-y bits like beadwork on wedding cakes. It pipes extremely well and sets up quickly into very firm and stable structures. That virtue is also royal icing’s curse, at least when it’s applied to something like a cupcake, since it dries […]
READ ONReader Arzu in Paris asks: Could you explain how you can pasteurize your egg whites or can you buy them like that? That’s an excellent question, Arzu, for indeed more and more people are having concerns about egg safety these days. Just this past summer there was a huge recall of salmonella-infected eggs here in […]
READ ONAny finesse I may bring to mixing other types of doughs and batters goes right out the window when I mix gingerbread. I just dump all the ingredients in the mixing bowl and stir. You can see in the below picture that I even ignored my own instruction to lightly beat the eggs. I just […]
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