Sunday, December 24, 2017

Gingerbread Creations

When I lived in Nevada, every year for Christmas I made gingerbread creations like this one: And this one: But then I moved to Hawaii. I love living in Hawaii, but it's humid. This is what happens to gingerbread creations in Hawaii: It was going to be a clock tower with a candy face and a light inside the top, but it softened and collapsed within a few hours of being assembled. Darn humidity.

When I told my mom about this, she had a solution. She bought me a set of star-shaped cookie cutters for making a cookie tree. The cookie tree, she said, couldn't fall over because each cookie was stacked on the one below it. It was a Hawaii-proof gingerbread creation. So I tried it. I still wanted to have candy windows, so I cut them out of the points of each of the larger stars. The finished product looked like this. Not too bad. But then it melted. And melted some more. That's Hawaii for you.

Over the next few years I tried different things. No more candy windows, but since a tree should be green I tried spreading each cookie with green frosting. Most of the green ended up hidden between the cookies.

So the next year I tried dipping each cookie in green frosting. That doesn't quite look the way I had envisioned it. It's all drippy.

This year I filled a decorating bag with green frosting and used a star tip. First I stacked up the cookies, using a ring of frosting between each one. Then I started at the bottom and piped the frosting onto the tips of each cookie star while my children put on the candies. Now that's more like it!
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