Craft Corner: Making enchanted houses

By ANNE WILLARD

As a child, I was particularly fascinated by an illustration in a fairy-tale book of the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel. Overlooking the dark, cautionary aspects of the tale, I found the idea of this house, walled with gingerbread and decorated with nuts, candies, cookies and all manner of good things to eat, the essence of enchantment.

The basic fascination long outlasted my reading of fairy tales, and in my early teens, having become interested in cooking, I decided that I would try to create (on a small scale) such a magical cottage myself. As I recall, my very first attempt fell down, but I persisted, and over the years developed some engineering techniques that can be used, with variations, to create gingerbread houses to suit anyone’s dreams.

Begin by creating templates for the pieces of the house in cardboard. To make sure your design works, you should actually assemble a small cardboard house, attaching the pieces with scotch tape. For stability, it is best to keep the longest wall at 8 inches or under. The simplest house has two rectangular walls, two walls with pointed gables, and two roof pieces. For a slightly more advanced house, and maximum stability, add a porch, for which you will need a piece for the floor, a somewhat wider piece for the roof, two triangular pieces to support the roof, and three support pieces for the floor.

Next, make a batch of ginger snaps. “The Joy of Cooking” has the recipe I use, another can be found online at www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1710,152177-252192,00.html.

You will need a cookie sheet without a rim, so you can roll the dough out directly onto it. Lightly grease the cookie sheet or sheets and rolled out the dough in large sheets about 1/8 inch thick. You almost certainly will have to add flour to make the dough manageable to roll; just add flour and work it in with your hands until it stops sticking to the rolling pin. Using the cardboard pieces as cookie-cutter templates to cut out the pieces of the house. About three quarters through the recommended cooking time, take the pieces out of the oven, put the templates over them again, and trim their edges, which will have swollen and blurred in the heat. This is also the time to cut out any windows or doors. (If you cut windows and doors before cooking, the edges will blur; if you wait until the end, the pieces may be brittle enough to crack). Replace the pieces in the oven and finish cooking. The recommended cooking time in your recipe will probably be too short for these big pieces. Keep checking them every three minute or so; they are done when they start to brown at the edges.

Let the pieces cool completely. Then grease the cookie sheets and put the wall pieces back on them. If you intend to insert candy canes, cinnamon sticks or the like into the windows in order to create panes, insert them now. Also put any decorations you intend to use next to the pieces so that they can be glued on rapidly. You can use not only candy but nuts and whole spices; both star anise and cloves, for instance, are highly decorative, and cinnamon and natural licorice sticks can be used for window trim or porch posts.

For window glass and glue use lollipop candy without flavor or coloring added. Please note that working with the hot syrup can be dangerous, since it is not only very hot but sticky, and is difficult to get off your skin. Work with a big bowl of cold water readily available to plunge your hand into in case of accidents.

The basic lollipop recipe is one cup water mixed with one-half cup sugar and one-third cup of corn syrup. Stir until dissolved over low heat, and then let boil until it reaches the hard crack stage (300-310F). If you dont have a candy thermometer, drip the syrup into a bowl of ice water. Once it forms brittle pieces that crack rather than bend when you try to break them, the syrup is done. Take it off the heat immediately.

First, spoon syrup into the windows of the pieces lying on the greased cookie sheets. Then, use small dabs of the syrup to cement decorative items. Finally, if your house has a porch, assemble the porch using the syrup as glue and attach the floor and roof to the relevant piece (but leave the piece lying flat).

The syrup dries rapidly and you will have to work fast. It is possible that you will have to make a second batch of syrup to complete this stage.

After the pieces have had about an hour to cool, gently use a spatula to release the pieces with their lollipop windows from the cookie sheets. Stand up the wall with the porch attached if you have one.

Heat another batch of syrup to the hard crack stage, and use it as a glue to assemble the house. Hold the pieces together for a few seconds as you attach them to give the glue a chance to solidify. Attach the roof last. If the syrup is still liquid after you have all the pieces connected, dribble it along the edges of the roof—it will drip down and form candy icicles.

The final step is to decorate the roof. The simplest method is to use white icing for snow, but you can also use cookies or candies as shingles. One year I even made a thatched roof, using cinnamon sticks as roofbeams and shredded wheat for thatch.

Once you have the basics mastered, you can let your imagination run wild. You can create styles from the medieval to the modern. You can even do a miniature of your own house. Put your house on a platter amidst drifts of sugar snow and you will have a holiday centerpiece to delight children of all ages.