"gingerbread houses" news and stories

Thanksgiving hasn't even passed, but already people are thinking about building a gingerbread house.

The traditional ginger bread house can be as simple as four walls and a roof stuck together with icing. If you're looking for something more spectacular, check out "The Gingerbread Architect" by Susan Matheson and Lauren Chattman, authors who recreate 12 iconic American homes -- from a Greek Revival antebellum plantation gingerbread house to an urban brownstone. Jennifer Lindner McGlinn gives instructions on a Betsy Ross gingerbread house and a gingerbread church in her book "Gingerbread: Timeless Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Desserts, Ice Cream and Candy."

Wendy Copley shares her tips for making the gingerbread house shown above on her blog Wendolonia. Get started with KitchenDaily's gingerbread house recipe.

• Most coffee-flavored recipes call for that pesky instant stuff, but here is a recipe for espresso cookies that calls for the real thing -- finely ground dark-roast beans.
• You might have heard about the political turmoil up here in Canada, that got the Star thinking about pierogies.
• Holiday baking and butter tarts become the tourist-link to a small town.
• Habitat for Humanity gets into gingerbread houses for a holiday fundraiser.
• More Recipes: Pumpkin Ginger Pillows and Tuscan Bean and Kale Soup

I'd rather devote my holiday prep time to decorating cookies and wrapping gifts, but I still have a deep appreciation of the incredible amount of work that goes into making a prize-winning gingerbread house. Even if that house won a ribbon at the local school holiday bake sale and not at a national competition. The above gingerbread house, found via the lollypix blog, won the grand prize at the national gingerbread house competition in Florida (you can peek inside here) this year.

I'll stick with cookies, but read on for a few more houses.

Gingerbread houses are fun to make but because they require very hard, sturdy cookies that will hold up to several weeks of display, they are not necessarily the dough used to make them will probably not produce the tastiest holiday cookies that you'll have. If you bake smaller gingerbread cookies, you can get a better consistency and flavor, but you have to give up on the idea of having a three-dimensional cookie showpiece. Unless you use the holiday storybook cookie cutters from Williams-Sonoma, of course. These cookie cutters give you the chance to play with your food without having to worry about finding a recipe will produce a sturdy enough cookie to support the weight of a whole house. They have notches on the pieces so that after they are baked, the cookies can be fit together to form three-dimensional holiday shapes. The 8-piece set allows you to create a perfectly seasonal scene on a small, managable scale and the cookies can still be stored in an airtight container if you want to keep them fresh.

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