Fat little dumplings

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.

Basically, we sucked hard at this challenge. We had decided ahead of time that gingerbread, as an edible substance, sucked balls, so we set out to “improve” the flavour of these ghastly biscuits. Instead of adding any ginger, we added cocoa and cinnamon, which to our minds, would have created a lovely, gently spiced and delicate flavour. FAIL. We also had grand, somewhat delusional plans to improve on the overall aesthetic of the gingerbread house, by creating a gingerbread igloo. BAM. Another, EPIC FAIL.

Behold, our grim concoction:

Yeah… Note, even the vampire snowman is so disgusted with this that he has spewed (if you can believe it, this is the best photo we could get of the final product). We had absolutely no luck with this thing, from start to finish. First, the dough was a motherfucker to work with: we couldn’t roll it out, so we ended up hammering it, until we managed to get it semi smooth, and semi thin.

THEN, when we got to construction, we found that the biscuit was way too crumbly to hold the shape of the igloo we had formed (no pictures unfortunately, but it was shit.) So, we went with the back up plan of a Christmas tree – so festive, isn’t it. We just love Christmas. As you can see, we had problems too with the royal icing – that stuff is sticky as all shit, but it failed to stick anything together, apart from our fingers. All in all, a massive failure.

We can’t even be arsed putting the recipe up, since we clearly have talked it up so much… although, the modifications we made to the recipe, such as adding only cocoa, and no ginger, could have been responsible for the ultimate failure. Oops. See below for more pictures from this fraught experience:

Our ultra thick dough… note the hammer in the background. It totally came in handy. And check out the fall of the Roman Empire down below. Oooph!

And finally… our mystery picture! Ta daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!