Gingerbread Craft

When I was growing up, my parents had the Time Life Foods of the World series. I don't think we used them much for recipes, but the thing I do remember was gazing in wonder at the cover of the German volume, imagining that one day I would make a gingerbread house like the picture.


In October 2008, just before Little Bro was born, ALDI had a DIY gingerbread house kit where the precut cookies and decorations were provided and just needed to be stuck together with icing. I initially dismissed the kit with the thought "I could make that myself", but then knowing that I would have a month-old baby at Christmas I stepped off my high horse and conceded that the kit would have its advantages. I ended up buying their gingerbread train kit to appeal to certain assistants and I thought the end result wasn't too bad:



This year with no newborn to serve as an excuse I thought I had better live up to my claims and make my own gingerbread train. The shapes were really simple- just rectangles in two sizes plus a cut-down circle, and a rectangle baked over the curve of a small glass jar to serve as the engine boiler. It's not shown here but the smokestack was a small cylinder of gingerbread.



Big Bro helped me to decorate (tip: make the icing on the sticky side or else the decorations don't stick to the sides!) and, toot-toot, we had a train!

For the record, the gingerbread recipe was from The Joy of Cooking and very (appropriately) hard but not as spicy as I would have liked, while the icing was one egg white, about a cup and a half of icing sugar, plus the juice of a lemon.