Today our weekly dinner was Monday night, instead of Sunday (busy holiday weekend) and we made a side of wild mushroom fettucine with our version of chicken parmesan (oven-roasted chicken served along side oven-roasted tomatoes) but the real story was our Gingerbread Adventure.  We were inspired by our trip to Gingerbread Lane at the New York Hall of Science to make a Gingerbread house from scratch.  But we probably should have taken one of the classes they were offering…because ours didn’t turn out quite like theirs.

We made gingerbread dough and cut out the walls and roofs and roof supports (we traced out patterns on paper and laid the paper as a guide on the rolled out gingerbread dough).  Once the gingerbread was baked and cooled, we made a very stiff royal icing (but maybe not quite stiff enough) and proceeded to construct the house…it took a long time because we had to hold the sides together until the icing hardened.  Here are some photos of the process; but keep reading down below for the full story:

Baked Gingerbread house pieces

Making the royal icing

Royal Icing!! (aka edible cement)

The four walls…

The roof: we had a small crack so fixed it with our royal icing.  The coffee cans are holding roof together till icing dries

Success! or so we thought…

So we were pretty happy with the house. and took a break to let it dry so we could make dinner.  While we we working on dinner, however, catastrophe struck!.  The roof caved in and the walls buckled out. Clearly we had not built our house to the exacting NYC housing code.  We managed to salvage the house, and rebuild, but now it is a Gingerbread Bungalow.  Mom says we can make more royal icing, cover the house like stucco, decorate, and it will be the new thing in Gingerbread building.  Stay tuned to see how that works out.

Gingerbread Bungalow!

Flat-roofed gingerbread house—best for earthquake zones.

Oh and dinner was good too.  We expanded on our mushroom challenge, and cooked chopped shitake, chanterelle, cremini and button mushrooms in butter and truffle salt and served over fresh fettucine.   We also practiced our plating skills with the chicken parmesan. Mom practiced her video skills.  She needs more practice than we do

Wild mushroom fettucine

PS: here’s what the final gingerbread bungalow looked like:

Regardless of how it looked, it tasted yummy.