Mostly MY gingerbread house, mostly vegan!

Oh, am I tired! But I finished up my gingerbread house. My son lost interest after I had to temporarily pack the pieces up so we could eat dinner. There were a couple of hiccups, I burnt my thumb, and well, if you were looking for someone to make you an edible house, I need to work on my cookie carpenter skills, but I love it all the same. In my previous entry, I talked about how I was going to sub the golden syrup in the How To Cook That recipe by microwaving pancake syrup and sugar. Well, I did that, and some of the water evaporated, so I added back in some additional sugar and some molasses. Anyway, the dough was easy to work with, and it baked just fine so my hack worked!

Now the one thing that makes vegan gingerbread houses tricky is royal icing. Royal icing isn’t vegan as it contains egg white powder. There are vegan recipes that have aquafaba but I don’t really trust they’ll behave correctly. So I found that you can melt sugar and use it to stick together your pieces. It worked but OMG, it was an ordeal. I had to keep heating it back up in the microwave and once I accidentally dropped molten sugar on my thumb — OW! And somehow, despite trying really hard not to, my house pieces weren’t so even. I forgot to ice my snowman white before I attached him so I guess he’s just a roundman.

I did discover, though, you can melt the fruit slices candy in the microwave and it’ll make really neat looking stained glass. I microwaved them on parchment for 30 seconds and folded the parchment over and rolled them out thin and threw them in the fridge for a few minutes. In person, it looks really beautiful, although I’m not sure the photography did it justice.

And, y’all, I think you should be scared of that dog.