Dough or do not: my annual gingerbread tries
I’ve fallen into the habit of creating gingerbread concoctions of increasing difficulty every holiday season. I don’t think there’s a rehab for this type of thing, but now it’s bordering on addiction.
We didn’t make gingerbread houses as kids, save for the graham-cracker-and-frosting forts sometimes provided as activities at Christmas parties. But if there’s one thing Disney Parks do well, it’s over-the-top seasonal gingerbread displays. I’m guessing that’s where some of this ambition comes from. One of my favorite Christmas memories was a trip to Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa with my friend Steven when we were 18. There, the gingerbread house is an actual house. It’s quite literally large enough to house the Cast Members who sell gingerbread from inside of it. Steven and I, giddy with our gingerbread cravings, bought two gingerbread shingles covered in milk chocolate and patiently waited a few days to enjoy them together on Christmas Eve. Cutting to the punchline: they were terrible. It turns out the shelf-stable, construction gingerbread isn’t delicious. Steven and I still talk about the disappointing gingerbread shingles of Christmas ‘06.
I tracked down a photo from my very first Facebook Album: Yuletide Havok Wreaking. Here’s baby me in front of the gingerbread house at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa in Orlando. Oof.
2017: Fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy
Four years ago, I dipped my toe into making my own gingerbread house. I’m a fan of gingerbread cookies. I have a vague sense of engineering and construction. How hard could it be? So naturally I thought I’d start with the Millennium Falcon. Sure, I could have attempted a basic one-story cottage. But no. Your standard cottage doesn’t have the maneuverability of a Corellian light freighter, and I doubt it can do the Kessel Run at all, let alone break any records. I freehanded the shape of the ship into a big roll of dough and frosted in all the details. The sides of the ship were messy - mostly individual gingerbread rectangles secured with a bunch of frosting. For the feet, I just stacked the ship on some small round gingerbread coins. It was my intro-level primer into Star Wars gingerbread construction, and I’ll always remember it fondly.
Gingerbread note to self: Don’t try to cut corners on your construction materials. I always use Martha Stewart’s recipe for sturdy gingerbread and royal icing from my well-worn copy of “The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The Original Classics.” They’ve never let me down. I know it’s tempting to use a box mix or a can of frosting, but you want rigid cookies and fast-setting frosting if you expect to get anything to stay put.
2018: Restoring order to the galaxy
I’d moved to California and had zero baking equipment in my rental cottage for the holiday season. I still have night terrors about trying to mix smooth royal icing by hand using a teaspoon. Nevertheless, she persisted. It turns out my colleagues at the Imagineering campus take holiday sweets very seriously, so when I entered into our department’s dessert contest, I knew it was time to bring my gingerbread A-game. For this year, I made a First Order TIE Fighter with some little sugar cookie Death Stars around his base. This was the only year that colored frosting made an appearance, and I don’t think I needed it. There’s something classic about the white frosting and rusty gingerbread look. The hardest part? Shaping dough around foil spheres to get an orb-shaped center console for the TIE Fighter.
Gingerbread note to self: Royal icing is amazingly sturdy, but for really tricky angles and structural support, nothing beats white candy melts. It’s not white chocolate. It’s craft store magic that is much more forgiving about melting temperatures and camouflages to look like regular icing. It also hardens much faster than icing. It’s a secret weapon. I keep a dish warm to use for important seams and binding points, like getting the center sphere of the TIE Fighter to stick to the wings and stay put without supports.
2019: Snowballs and Hoth
I didn’t take home an award for my TIE Fighter in 2018, so for our department’s dessert contest the following year, I knew I wanted that sweet, sweet recognition. As we’ve already established, construction gingerbread isn’t crave-worthy and my Death Star sugar cookies were just so-so. That’s when the idea of snowball cookies, a variation on Mexican wedding cookies, came into play. Snowballs and the ice planet Hoth seemed like they went hand-in-hand, so the natural progression was to create an All-Terrain Armored Transport to accompany them. Making a freestanding AT-AT was no small feat. For this year, I did research on the shape of the walkers and drew out stencils before I started. Candy melts turned out to be a huge asset at all the joints and I was able to get a very sturdy AT-AT that stood without supports. Then I threw together a crumbly, buttery batch of our girl Martha’s pecan sandies shaped into spheres and rolled in powdered sugar while still warm. I’m pleased to say that I took home a department baking prize this year and the pecan sandie snowballs were a hit.
Gingerbread note to self: If you’re transporting your gingerbread masterpiece, bring a repair kit of sorts. The AT-AT was sturdy AF as I hauled it all over my apartment taking photos. But it didn’t survive the five minute drive to my work campus. I had it sitting upright on the floorboard of my passenger seat like an idiot, and one tap of the breaks sent it toppling faster than Luke Skywalker with a tow cable. Fortunately, I’d brought a baggie of candy melts and was able to repair a broken leg when I arrived at work and no one noticed the leg brace.
2020: “It’s a gingerbread diorama”
I was really looking forward to dominating our department’s bake off this year, but we’re all still working remotely and being extra safe to stop the spread of COVID-19. So there was no gauntlet being thrown, and themed cookie accompaniment was not necessary. Without a company-condoned proving ground, I turned instead to my trio of nerd pals to challenge me with a theme… and they did not disappoint. Jabba’s Palace. (I had a brief flash of miniature Slave Leia made of gingerbread.) It was game on. But instead of shaping the gingerbread into cylinders like a classic gingerbread house, I thought it might be fun to have the silhouette of the iconic Ralph McQuarry castle on the outside and a little scene on the inside. When I explained my idea to Alex, he likened it to animation cel layers in Disney’s multiplane camera. It’s a trick to achieve depth by putting things on their own planes. Delicious, cookie planes. I did a quick sketch of the characters I wanted to see in gingerbread and then plotted how deep into the scene I wanted them to be:
Back wall (all three castle turrets): Han in carbonite, interior details
Fourth plane (all three castle currets): Lando and Bib Fortuna
Third plane (two castle turrets): Jabba on dais
Second plane (two castle turrets): Leia and Salacious B. Crumb on dais
First plane (main turret only): R2-D2 and C-3PO
A top view of the diorama construction. Each layer was a different flat of gingerbread, and then they were all stacked on a rectangle of gingerbread and adhered with candy melts.
This is a blog called Seriously Nerdy. Were you expecting something else from a breakdown of Star Wars gingerbread traditions? As pleased as I am with the final result, the best part of this year was having Alex elect to make his own amazing gingerbread creation right alongside me. He opted to make a giant, blueprint-accurate gingerbread Star Destroyer despite having never created in gingerbread before. And it turned out pretty damn incredible.
Having a partner in crime for nerdy crafts is one of the greatest joys in my life. Between successfully stacking up Jabba’s Gingerbread Palace and watching a handsome gentleman frost an Imperial ship, 2020 is easily the best year of gingerbread yet.
Gingerbread note to self: I don’t know how I’m just now discovering how amazing parchment paper is, but holy hell, it’s really handy stuff. I normally just use it to bake cookies, but about halfway through gingerbreading we realized we could roll our cookies on it and cut them out on top of the parchment, meaning we didn’t lose any angles or details during the awkward transfer to the baking sheet. If you’re not already using parchment paper, you’re missing out! Bonus: the brand we have is unbleached, compostable and made from recycled paper, so it’s a little greener for the world.
I realize people have beautiful holiday traditions dating back decades- stars on Christmas trees, legacy recipes, precious carols. I have a Muppet tree topper and a running gag of making Star Wars gingerbread. I have seriously nerdy holiday traditions. And you know what? They’re all the Christmas spirit I need.