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For December's Daring Bakers' challenge we were asked to bake and decorate a gingerbread house. Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi gave us two recipes for gingerbread. Anna provided a recipe from Good Housekeeping magazine and Y's was from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book by Beatrice Ojakangas. I decided to make a half portion of Y's recipe. I didn't use the spices that the recipe called for since we did not plan to eat the gingerbread. I didn't want to waste any spices since they are expensive. But I did add just a bit of ground ginger and cinnamon to give a nice spicy holiday scent. The other requirement was that our entire house must edible. Nothing like cardboard or glue to help support the house was allowed.

This was definitely more like a construction and decorating challenge than a baking challenge. The dough came together easily and rolled nicely. I created a template for my roof and walls using a file folder and then cut out the pieces from the rolled dough before baking.



I made one large house and one tiny house. I cut simple triangles for my trees using the leftover dough.





Royal icing made with meringue powder was my glue and assorted candies were my decoration. A bed of finely shredded desiccated coconut provided the snowy landscape. I was amazed that the pieces of my house actually fit together since I'm not known for my assembly skills and I was equally amazed that the royal icing glue held it all together without drooping or sliding.

This was my first ever gingerbread house. Overall it was a fun challenge which brought out the child in me. :) Happy holidays to you and your family! See you in 2010.


Gromit's view from the sky


A perfect landing

The fine print:
The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

A Decent, Honest Cookie

Even though I consider myself more of an optimist than a pessimist, I am also a realist. And the reality is there are some people out there who do some bad things. So when you lose your wallet you would expect that it's lost for good and that your identity might be compromised (i.e. stolen). Just when you think that the world can be a pretty messed up place someone does something to remind you that people are good. Like when you get a postcard in the mail saying that the sender found your wallet and had no way to contact you except by using the address on your driver's license. And if you are indeed the rightful owner of said wallet please call them to describe the wallet and its contents and then come to their house to claim the wallet. It's comforting to know that there are still truly decent, honest people in the world!

What is more decent and honest than a chocolate chip cookie? Not to say that other cookies are any less decent. In fact, I would say that all cookies are decent. Maybe I should call chocolate chip cookies comforting.

A few weeks ago someone asked me if I had a chocolate chip cookie recipe on my blog and it was at that moment that I realized I have never posted one. When I first started making chocolate chip cookies, like many American home bakers, I used the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe found on the back of the bag. In high school and college, any homemade chocolate chip cookie was delicious so Toll House cookies sufficed. And I continued to use the Toll House recipe for many years after that, but it always bothered me that I would get inconsistent results with that recipe. I'm sure the Toll House recipe is a good one, but it was just incompatible with me. Even to this day I have no idea what I was doing wrong in the kitchen. So after many more unhappy batches, I finally abandoned the Toll House recipe and searched for a new one.

It was around that time when former Chez Panisse pastry cook David Lebovitz's "Room for Dessert" came out. I was a big fan of SF Bay Area pastry chefs at the time (and still am a big fan) and I bought every cookbook written by my local "pastry heroes". From the very first time I tried David Lebovitz's recipe many years ago to this very day, I always get great consistent results.

Chocolate cookie recipes are a matter of personal taste. There are a million recipes out there for chocolate cookies and everybody has their favorite recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Some might even claim that their recipe is the best. I would never call this recipe perfect or the best, but it's the one that really works for me, so it's the best one for me.