Our favorite Christmas tradition is making gingerbread houses.
Long ago we gave up on the actual baking of the gingerbread and converted to cardboard. Reed is particularly good at creating our cardboard framework and it is a good creative outlet for his inner architect.
Here are the specs of the finished product. This house is 13" by 15" at the base and the tallest tower stands at 25" with the sugar cube spire. It required 8 lbs of powdered sugar, 18 egg whites and a lot of candy-2 tins of Schulze candy, 3 bags of M&M's, a box of sugar cubes, 6 packages of Necco candies, two bags of starlight mints, marshmallows, goldfish, smarties, gumballs, licorice, peeps snowmen and trees. Towards the end the kids were all rummaging through their caches of candy to finish the project.
It was Gingerbread house weekend for us. If the girls look tired it is because this was around 10pm after 4 hours of decorating.
Here are the specs of the finished product. This house is 13" by 15" at the base and the tallest tower stands at 25" with the sugar cube spire. It required 8 lbs of powdered sugar, 18 egg whites and a lot of candy-2 tins of Schulze candy, 3 bags of M&M's, a box of sugar cubes, 6 packages of Necco candies, two bags of starlight mints, marshmallows, goldfish, smarties, gumballs, licorice, peeps snowmen and trees. Towards the end the kids were all rummaging through their caches of candy to finish the project.
It was Gingerbread house weekend for us. If the girls look tired it is because this was around 10pm after 4 hours of decorating.Our girls at last were educated on the origins of Schulze candy. It technically is old fashioned hard candy (which my girls admitted to searching on the tin for the name "schulze"). When Reed was young his maternal grandfather passed away and his grandmother in later years remmaried to a man whose last name was Schulze. Turns out he would buy the grandkids a tin of old fashioned candy every christmas, and hence the name. There are rules surrounding the Schulze candy-none can go to waste, so every piece has to be incorporated into the house. The main use of the Schulze candy is the creation of a Schulze tree, which is made entirely of candy and royal icing all stacked together. At the end of the yule tide season when the house meets its ultimate fate-being beat to sugar dust and cardboard bits with any object that could be used with the verb "bludgeon" the tree is pitched in the air and if the physics line up, shatters into a spray of candy exploding off the end of a bat. Yea, its cool. After we finished the first question Heidi asked was "when can we hit it?"
The origins of these traditions are probably worth repeating, but another time.
2 comments:
Wow that is an awesome house! We made gingerbread houses last night with our friends and I am not even going to post them, they are like little shacks compared to yours. We used graham crackers though, I even told them about your houses, but I told them you made the gingerbread from scratch and they were so impressed. I like the cardboard idea, nice work.
This is exactly why we have stopped making gingerbread houses. They can never even come close to the masterpiece that your family creates every year! Thanks for posting the pics...I love to see the new addition each Christmas. What would we have done without the Schultz candy tradition? Classic. Where did you find the candy? It is hard to come by around here...
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