Gingerbread Discussion
archived from Pricing Board 7/24-26/2001

Cutting and Baking
Charlotte: How do you keep them in shape while baking? Or do you put them all out after they are baked? The recipe I used had it precut before baking and needless to say I had to recut everything to shape. That's the part I didn't like.

Karen: That is difficult -- getting them to keep their shape. I hate recutting them because you have to do it while they are hot and I would always burn my fingers.

There are a couple of ways around that. First of all, make sure you are rolling your dough thin enough. I seem to have more problems when I leave the dough too thick. Second, use Dolores recipe for gingerbread! I used that last year and didn't have to recut anything.

I don't eat my gingerbread houses and I don't encourage people to eat ones I give them. Personally I think it's disgusting to let all that candy sitting around for a couple of months collecting dust with who knows what crawling on it and then go and eat it. That being the case, you could probably omit, or at least really cut down on, the baking powder or soda in the recipe. I don't know how that would affect the taste or texture if you were going to eat them. The recipe that Theresa Layman has in her book does not have any baking powder or soda in it.

But I really recommend Dolores recipe. It was kind of messy to work with (it has melted  Crisco in it). I kept it in the frig, took out one piece to warm up. As I started rolling out the first piece, I took out the next piece to warm up so it would be ready when I was done with that one. Otherwise, it got too soft.

Also, it helps to have the cookie sheets with no edges. I roll out the gingerbread and cook  it right on the sheet. No matter how hard I tried, I was having problems because trying to  pick up a piece with a spatula was distorting it and then I'd have to recut it.

I cut gingerbread with my pizza wheel. It works pretty good!

Heleen: The dough I use holds its shape pretty well, as long as I cut the pieces on the cookie sheet. I just lay a big enough piece on the sheet and cut the pattern from there. If you move the dough after cutting, it looses it's shape, which is very frustrating.

Decorating Ideas
Charlotte:  Loved reading both your posts. Made only one gingerbread house and said I'd never do it again, but that was before I had my little ones. Now I am considering doing it again just for them to decorate.  The frosting part and decorating was okay. Even made a train station with a candy train attached to the house. I made the roof to lift off so used it for a cooky jar. Took it to work and let everyone help themselves to the cookies throughout the day. For little kids parties I've seen them done out of graham crackers, frosted and decorated, rather than using gingerbread.

Heleen: It sounds like you did a pretty, but also complicated project. If you do a 'standard' house (4 walls, 2 roof pieces and a chimney) I find that you can cheat a little here and there when assembling. If you try an "A-frame house" it would only have 4 pieces in total, and is super easy to make/assemble and gives you lots of decorating space:).

Last year, I made a lot of houses from the same paterns, but tried to decorate differently. I had the typical candy houses, other had cookies only, or only nuts, raisins, popcorn and banana chips shingles, the variety is endless.

Dolores has some great patterns, and there is a pattern of a truly beautiful birdhouse from Canadian living somewhere on the net. Super cute! I'll find the website for you and post! …
It seems the link for the birdhouse has disappeared. It was from Candian Living but I can't find it anymore. If you go to www.thekitchenlink.com though, choose 'cookies' for subject and then 'gingerbread wrokshop' there's o ton of info about gingerbread related websites, and books available on the subject. Hope this helps a little!

Charlotte: Thanks! Great link. I think I'll start with gingerbread ornaments and see how my kids do with those before going on to houses.

Heleen:  I love making gingerbread houses. I am always looking for patterns. You said the Good Housekeeping pattern? Could you tell me in which issue it is? Or even better, can I get it on the internet? I don’t have access to the magazine, that's why I'm asking so many questions :).

Karen: http://goodhousekeeping.women.com/gh/eatwell/cooking/c9ghgh16.htm
Every year, Good Housekeeping has a gingerbread house contest (I've never entered, although I keep meaning to...) They also feature a gingerbread house designed by a famous baker. I don't know who designed the one above (which is from 1999), but the one from the year previously was designed by Colette Peters! You can find that one, with instructions, by clicking on the above link and then on that page, clicking on a link on the right which reads "Last Year's interactive Gingerbread House".

I was disappointed last year because the gingerbread house was not on the cover of Good Housekeeping, which it has been for a long time.
They also did not put the instructions on their website like they had for the last 2 years...

Heleen: Thanks for the link Karen! I love Colette Peters' work. Do you have her book "Colette's Christmas"? It has so many nice ideas in it. I plan on trying some of those this year as well. She has beautiful gingerbread giftboxes which aren't hard to bake but seem a lot of fun as far as the
decorating goes. I think you can see samples of the book at colettes website, it has some pictures of the contents.

Other good sources are gingerbread books by Teresa Layman. I have never seen such beautiful, detailed patterns as hers. They are really works of art, and so much fun to make! I have made at least 10 projects out of those books, and they were all just wonderful. Lost of work, but worth every minute! The teresa Layman books are really excellent. You won't believe you eyes when you see the things she does out of gingerbread. In one of the books there's also a haunted house for Halloween, with gingerbread ghosts, burnt trees and stuff like that. Very, very cute. I just never made this particular house, because in our country Halloween is not celebrated. She uses techniques I never thought of: for the Halloween house she tints the dough with black food coloring before baking. And there's a pattern for a sleigh with six reindeer, where the sleigh dough is colored red. Other than that, she makes popcorn trees, trees out of piped gingerbread dough, she uses thinned royal icing to color house parts, it's just too much to mention. And it's not only houses, she has Noah's ark, a horse carousel, landscaped gardens, ornaments, lanterns, even a baby carriage. Check it out if you can, you won't be sorry :).

Colette's work is fabulous also. More 'classy' I think.

Karen: Wow! I'll definitely need to check out the Theresa Layman book. Almost all the Good Housekeeping houses use colored, thinned royal icing to cover the walls or sections of the houses, but those other techniques sound cool.

Gingerbread Parties
Karen: The last 2 years in a row I had a gingerbread party at my house. I’ve already booked the date for my party for this year – the first Sunday in December. I made enough houses so each person who came would have one. I bought all the candy, made the icing and let everyone decorate and assemble them themselves.

The first gingerbread party I had was with friends and our 'little sisters.' The church I go to has a school (K-12). About half the students in the high school part dorm with various members of the community. So some of us twenty-somethings decided to adopt girls, especially if they were dorming, and check in with them on a regular basis by phone or e-mail and get together to do things about once a month or so. In December, we all got together at my house and decorated gingerbread houses.

Last year, I just invited my friends over. The age range was 3-40! The 3 year old made a house. She was so funny. Her monther told me that when she went home she went marching right up to her father and showed it to him. He oohed and aahed over it and she immediately asked if she could eat it! (Her mother had been telling her on the way home that she couldn't eat it until her father saw it. They only live a mile from me).

Several years ago, for one of my cousins birthday party with the family, I had a party to decorate caterpillar cakes. I made cupcakes, set them out in curving lines on a cookie sheet (one cookie sheet per kid) and iced them. Then I gave the kids jimmies, coconut, different colors sugar
sprinkles, etc and let them decorate their caterpillar. The youngest one was about 2 and still did a fine job.

Also, I found that many people who are doing this for the first time, prefer to have the house unassembled for decorating. They seem to be more confident that the candy is going to stay on or something...

Last weekend I was at the house of a friend who came to the gingerbread party last year with her 3 children. She still had on display the house she had personally made as well as the house one of her children made. The other 2 children had not finished their houses and she told me she still had the pieces of them in a box so sometime she could finish it with them.

I was also thinking about offering to make houses, bring supplies and let kids decorate as a party idea. I think it would be great for adults as well. What do you think you would charge for this? I think at least $20/house with some sort of minimum because if you are going to go to the party you have to cover your time as well.

Heleen: Karen, what a wonderful thing to do for those girls :). Hearing about things like this just makes the day more beautiful!

The gingerbread party you described is something I would love to do. Actually, I have been thinking about it as a business idea. Like giving a party for a kid's birthday or something, where you bring all the houses and candy and let the kids have a go at it. So far I've done nothing with it though.

It must have been a LOT to work though, to prepare everything. My mom and sister helped me last year to decorate some houses, and what I did was make sure that everything was baked and assembled, so they just had to decorate. I assume that's what I would do for a party too, but imagine baking and building, 10-20 houses? I can manage about 4 on one evening. And then assisting at that party for a few hours?  I think that in general gingerbreading is quite expensive, time-wise. I guess that the price should indeed be at least $20. On the other hand, if Ilook at my situation, I don't know a lot of moms that would be willing to pay that money for a kids' party. It would be more in the range of $10 (in comparison of course). If you would make smaller houses to save some money, you would probably hardly save on the time you spent. Need to give this some more thought!

Karen: It was a lot of work to bake them, but I did not assemble the houses for the party. I gave everybody a cake cardboard covered with foil, and the pieces for a house and let them decorate and assemble themselves. They were sturdy enough to be able to taken home, carefully held on
laps or even in car trunks in cardboard boxes.

Selling Gingerbread
Karen: I was wondering if any of you make gingerbread houses to sell. I love making gingerbread houses. I usually make myself the Good Housekeeping Gingerbread house every year. I was thinking of making gingerbread houses to sell this year, but (of course) have no idea how to price them. I have a pattern I use that I took from a cast iron pan I  bought at Williams Sonoma many years ago. These are small gingerbread houses -- maybe 4" x 6" and about 6" tall. I'll have to measure -- they might not be that big. Anyway, I was thinking of selling them for $25 each. What do you think? I work in a big law firm, and thought I'd just advertise them in the in house bulletin and deliver them right to work.

Heleen: I sold gingerbread houses for the first time at a Christmas market last year. As I'm in the Netherlands, I'm sure there's no use in comparing prices, but what I noticed is that the smaller items sold first and best. People love what you have but often can't or don't want to spend a lot of money on edible things. The bigger houses are so much work, you could hardly ever get the money they're worth (in my experience). I took some really large houses with me to show off, and priced them so high I was sure nobody would buy them.  I gave them as gifts to my parents and sister after the show :). I did have some sleighs  with reindeer (that were a LOT of work) that sold like cookies though, even though I did  price them high. I sold them within ten minutes and had requests for them for two days.  I'm going to see if I can simplify the pattern and make some smaller ones, as I'm sure they will be a hit.

Last year I made a lot of those tiny houses, for which I asked a price that would compare  to $4. They were so much work (cutting all the walls with the teeny tiny windows and doors, assembling, everything) that I feel I hardly made some money at all. Strange thing is, that people would gladly buy 6 of those small houses for $24 (I had an example to use them as a place 'card'), but were complaining that $20 was a lot of money for a mid-sized  house loaded with candy. The people that understood how much work and effort it takes gladly bought from me telling me I was too cheap.

Other things I made: gingerbread cookie garlands (gingerbread men, trees, bells and bears, all not decorated, just pretty ribbon), lanterns, small 3-D cookie trees, and candy wreaths.

traciep: I sell them every year at craft shows. My small house, 4x4x6 sells for $10. You could probably get more, but at craft shows, it's easy to get people to spend $10 on one item. I also sell larger ones up to $150. I also do lanterns, boxes, gingerbread men, etc. People love them. they really do sell well. Around here, they don't ask if you are legal or not (at craft shows). I do label everything I sell, even if stuff like my pretzels, which say....This pretzel has been dipped in milk chocolate and rolled in mini M&M's....... There's no tax on food sales like that here, and I've never been asked to fill out any forms at the shows I do. I know the people selling fudge and homemade candies at the shows are not legal. I am though. I shipped a ton of gingerbread to California last Christmas. I wonder why it's not a big item out there. One company bought 275 gingerbread men from me for their Christmas party. I always thought California would have tons of specialty shops.

Charlotte: I take Christmas panorama sugar balls and Santa canes to my kids schools, with help of their teacher, and set them out in the teachers' lounge during the lunch hour and sell quite a bit that way. You may want to try it with your stuff, if you have kids. I used to take my stuff to work as a decoration for my desk and other family members would do the same where they worked. The orders started coming in as people would see them and would want one for themselves or for gifts. Here in Calif. at least where I am, they don't regulate one day events. That is why at craft shows and fairs, flea and farmers markets, etc. they can sell food related items without having legal or commercial kitchens. I used to do Christmas craft fairs and would sell small cho. and carrot cakes, and fruitcake, besides my crafts of batting snowmen and panoramic Christmas sugar balls. Funny that I don't remember ever seeing anyone sell gingerbread houses at these fairs.
Compiled for you by Karen

NOTE: If you want patterns or other ideas, please also visit my private web site at http://w3.one.net/~proicer/index.html and go to GINGERBREAD.

TIP: If you don’t like the taste but the recipe works well, try different spices, or combinations. Also substitute a different molasses. Molasses change is especially important when you wish to have darker dough…use dark Karo or other brand.

Dolores