Miniature gingerbread houses for Christmas

Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without a gingerbread house. This is a wonderful European tradition that is decorative as well as yummy, and seems to be only growing in popularity the world over.

This year I was inspired by a design from Megan (notmartha.org) who made tiny houses to sit over the edge of a coffee cup. While I didn't need mine to sit on a cup, I love the miniaturising idea so I helped myself to her templates and instructions, which you can find here.

None of these pictures really show the scale of these houses but if you're trying to work out how big they are, they stand approximately 10cm (4in.) high from the base to the top of the roof.

My family is partly Norwegian in origin so I was delighted to find that gingerbread houses are a huge thing in Norway. In Bergen at Christmas each year, people build an entire gingerbread city.

It is called a Pepperkakebyen.  I KNOW.

I can't compete with those crazy Norwegians and their awesome city, but I did make a little street of tiny houses.

Actually, it would be wonderful for a Christmas party to make lots of these little houses and arrange them like a little village. Maybe I'll do that next year.

I decorated the houses all differently. I admit, I was a little distracted doing these and just used whatever I had to had, but if you planned it out in advance you could stock up on lots of little sweets for decorating.
I used royal icing, piped (messily) in loops and straight lines on the roof, then stuck a variety of lollies, mini M&Ms, hearts, stars and freckles on.

This roof was just little jelly watermelon halves, hearts and royal icing.

I actually liked the restraint of just using red and white - some of the others were a riot of colour and ended up looking messy.

So how do you start? There are so many different types of gingerbread out there. If you want to make houses you will need a recipe that makes a firm mixture that will dry hard-ish (think of a gingerbread man - it's not crumbly or bendy, but firm and a bit chewy - that's the texture you want for gingerbread houses).

Martha Stewart has a great recipe for this purpose here. OF COURSE she does, she's Martha Stewart.

It makes a sticky, gooey dough mix which you can see in this pic. (I actually had a near disaster with this recipe - I made it all, and tipped it out of the mixing bowl to knead it, thinking "this is so dry! How unlike Martha to make a bad recipe!" ... only to realise that I had forgotten to put the molasses in. Luckily I remembered in time and piled it back into the bowl and dumped a truckload of molasses on it, and it was fine.)

Because the dough is so sticky and tacky (well, it is if you remember the molasses) you need to chill it in the fridge or freezer for a while before even attempting to roll it out.

When you do roll it out, to prevent it sticking to your rolling pin, bench, hair, face and entire kitchen, put the dough on top of a sheet of foil, then put a sheet of clingfilm over the dough and work the rolling pin over the top of the clingfilm. This way you can roll it out flat like in this pic.

When you've rolled the dough out flat to the size of a baking tray, put it onto the baking tray you'll use (still with the foil underneath, but take the clingfilm off the top) and put it back in the fridge while you prepare your templates - I made these from notmartha's PDF. They are made of thin card that won't tear.

Grab the baking tray out of the fridge and lay the templates down on the dough and use a sharp knife to cut around them. Then GENTLY peel away the excess dough, being careful not to stretch or distort your template shapes.

The excess dough can be re-rolled.

For each house you need two of each of the three shapes. SO for instance, in this baking tray, I have enough shapes to make two houses, plus an extra frontage.

You'll need a whole afternoon for this process. It takes time.

You need to put the tray of finished shapes back in the fridge to firm up again before baking, or they will rise too much and the shapes will deform.

After they have been chilled, they can be popped in the oven for 10 minutes to bake. This tray of cooked shapes is the same tray as the one above. It was the first tray I baked and I overcooked some of the shapes - you can see at the bottom that the big oblongs are a bit too coloured.

When you first take the shapes out of the oven they are a bit soft and at this stage they can be trimmed around the edges if they have risen too much or aren't straight.

 When the shapes are cool you can start constructing the houses!

I used a packet of royal icing mix from the supermarket but if you want to make your own, of course Martha Stewart has a recipe.


I found it easiest to lay the front of the house flat and stick the two side walls on, then put the back of the house on top of these. At this point you can carefully turn the house upright and the walls should all support each other.

Next come the roof panels.

Put them both on together and hold in place for a few moments.

Then pipe some royal icing into the gap between the roof panels, and leave the house to dry.

It surprised me how stable these little houses were once they had been put together. They were pretty indestructible. It turns out royal icing has magical sticking power.

The only thing remaining is to decorate your houses in any way you see fit.

If you are doing this with little people I recommend you make the dough, the shapes, bake them and construct the houses by yourself, and then have a big decorating session with the kids - the first stages are time consuming, difficult and tedious for littlies but the decoration stage can be enjoyed by even very young kidlets.




Happy Christmas!!

Horse race cake for Melbourne Cup (cake) Day

Melbourne Cup Day is the first Tuesday in November, the greatest event on the racing calendar all year. Others may have the Grand National and Ascot, but for an Australian there is nothing better than the race at which legends are made. 

So the least I could do was to celebrate the event with a horse race cake. 

In Australia, it's 'the race that stops the nation' - so of course the other side of the flag had to read...

As Flemington race course has a grass racing surface (Mr Cupcake helpfully informed me of that, I assumed they raced on a sandy track) I made a little grassy ring on top of a sandy track-type surface. 

If I'd had an oval tin, I would have used that, but mehhh.... circles are good for racing too aren't they?

This was the very simple start to the horse race cake. A chocolate mud cake, adapted to be gluten free (regular readers of this blog will begin to notice a pattern here) - I swear, it makes not a jot of difference to the taste. 

I had two cake tins exactly the same size and 'nested' them to bake this, so that there would be an extra layer of insulation - the tins were quite thin so this effectively doubles the thickness of the tin and ensures a more consistent heat spread and a better result. 

I drizzled the cake with a diluted, strained apricot jam to keep it moist, then ganached the cooled cake and hot-knifed the ganache for a smooth surface (detailed instructions here).

Then I rolled out a piece of sandy-coloured fondant big enough to cover the top and sides in one piece, and draped it over, attaching it to the cake with a light painting of water. 

I smoothed the fondant from the centre outwards, using first my hands, then a cake smoother (amazing plastic contraption that looks a bit like a skinny little iron). I trimmed around the base really carefully - this is actually really hard to do, and usually I have to cover my terrible mess with a ribbon on the base. But I was really OCD about it this time, and it paid off. 

So then it was time to work on the horses. 

I'd seen a blurry front-on pic of a horse figure that some brilliant person had posted on Facebook's Cake Decorating Society page. That started me on my modelling but there was a lot of experimentation involved. 

Here you see the horse body (the big bit), and the four little legs, with toothpicks sticking out for support when the figure is put together. 

Same deal, different colour - once I had a pattern I tried to be consistent in size and shape, and kept a finished horse beside me all the time to use as a model. 

This disembodied horse's head may freak out anyone who's seen The Godfather, but I promise you it's perfectly innocent. His little head had to be made separately before being attached because of the detail on the face. 

Ears were two layers of teardrop shaped fondant in contrasting colours; his blaze (do you call it that? - Yasmin, my most knowledgeable horse friend where are you when I need you) - anyway, his STRIPE down his nose, and his muzzle, were rolled fondant cut into a strip and pressed by hand into an oval, respectively. 

The two nostrils were made with tweezers - I keep a pair exclusively to use for cake decorating. 

I was worried about whether his little legs would collapse under the weight of his big fat tummy, but fortunately he held together very well, the little darling. He looks a bit scared. Big race coming up. 

He looked even more worried when I added his mane and tail. 

So I gave him some friends as quickly as possible, to calm his nerves and get some track work underway.

Cornflour helps their little hooves from sticking to the track. 

This is a rather undignified shot of a cheeky little mare with a white mane and tail. 

Her hairy bits were created from little strips shown here - the top one is the mane, and the lower is the tail, which gets rolled up a bit at one end and attaches to a little hole in her backside with a drop of water. 

Track work now commenced in earnest with four gallopers trying to lose their paunches before the big race. 

The one at the back still looks absolutely terrified, poor darling. 

...And so it was finally time to get them onto the course. As Mr Cupcake pointed out, their jockeys have not yet mounted, so this is possibly a training run. 

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen... have a wonderful Melbourne Cup Day and think of me and my colleagues in the office, taking a break for the few minutes of the race and accompanying it with a little bit of horse race cake!

Shirt and Tie Cupcakes for Parliament Week

As Parliament is sitting this week, it seemed appropriate to dress up a little!

Our pollies are quite fashion conscious and the choice of tie can be crucial. So I did these 'stuffed shirt' cupcakes to take in to work today.


















First I ganached the cupcakes. You start off with a cooled cupcake, and brush it with a little apricot jam diluted with water.

Then you spread it evenly with ganache (a mixture of cream and chocolate, made by pouring boiling cream onto small pieces of chocolate and stirring until it dissolves and becomes a thick, glossy mixture). The ganache needs to 'set' overnight after it is made to make sure it is the right consistency.

Finally, you dip a small metal spatula in boiling water and smooth the top so that no creases, dips or bumps remain. This gives you a completely flat surface to work with.

 For the shirts, I mixed up some pastel coloured RTR fondant using gel colouring (no one wears really bright business shirts).

Each shirt required one large circle, one wide strip, one little square and one tiny strip the same length as the square. This picture shows the quantities for two shirts.

You also need a contrasting fondant colour for the tie, and from this contrasting colour you need to hand cut a tie about 1cm wide at its widest point, and about 6cm long. You also need two small triangles, one .5 cm wide and one 1cm wide. These are not shown in the pic.





Use the big circle to cover the top of the cupcake. Adhere it with a few drops of water and burnish the top with a piece of flexible plastic, or a small cake smoother, to make the surface absolutely smooth and even.

Fold the wider strip in half lengthways and shape it into a horseshoe, or open-ended circle. This will be the collar of the shirt.









Using a little water on its base, stick the collar onto the top of the shirt.

Then stick the square piece of fondant onto the right side of the cupcake with a tiny drop of water, and stick the little strip across its top with an even smaller amount of water. This will be the shirt pocket.

Using a large needle or a small pointed working tool, prick tiny holes around the edges of the square to imitate stitching on the pocket.

Make the tie from a contrasting colour. You will need to hand-cut the ties, using a tapering oval shape as the base. Make them a little longer than the space between the bottom of the collar and the edge of the cupcake, and when positioning them, bend or fold them up a little so that they are more three dimensional.

For the knot in the tie, cut a tiny triangle out of rolled fondant in the same colour as the tie. Stick this over the top of the tie.

Try to tuck the little corners into the edges of the collar for extra realism :-)

Then cut another triangle, slightly bigger, to make a handkerchief for the shirt pocket. Stick this in place.

Stripey ties are really effective!

For stripes, roll out one colour as your base, to about 4mm thick (slightly thicker than you want it to end up). Lay this aside and cover it with plastic to stop it drying out.

Then take a second colour and roll it out slightly thinner. Cut long thin strips (2mm) from this, using a ruler and a sharp knife. 

Lay the strips across the base colour, making sure they are parallel. Then position your rolling pin and roll firmly in the direction of the strips.

You can then use your new 'stripey' colour to create fashionable ties for your stuffed shirts!



 Happy parliament week!

Lots 'n' lots of piggywig cupcakes!

A whole STY of piggywigs for morning tea at work this week!

"And there in the wood a Piggy-wig stood, with a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, with a ring at the end of his nose."

Although I love this quote from The Owl and the Pussycat it makes me wonder if I should have put little rings in the noses of my piggywig cupcakes.

Farming question: do piggywigs have rings in their noses these days??

These piggywigs are waiting expectantly for Tuesday morning tea at work. I chose this design because it's simple and quick, an advantage because on this occasion I needed to make a fair few of them and had limited time.

Piggywig uses one large round cutter to cut out the face. His snout is hand shaped by rolling a ball of fondant, then flattening it a bit top-to-bottom and upward-downward. The snout is stuck on to the face with a few drops of water, and you can use the end of a little paintbrush to make the dents for the nostrils.

The eyes are tiny balls of black fondant placed in tiny holes made by the smallest size of ball tool and moistened with a drop of water to stick them down.

The ears are stamped out with a little triangle cutter, but if you don't have one you could cut triangles with a knife.

This is the production line of piggywigs getting their snouts and ears and eyes put on.

I also brushed some rose petal dust (diluted with cornflour) onto the cheeks, to give them that rosy blush. I put a little on the tips of the ears too but it's a very subtle effect that is hard to see in the pics.

A warning, I cut the ear triangles and left them to dry for a short while because they were so soft that it was difficult to stand them up. But when they had dried a bit, they were much more likely to crack and have an uneven surface. I'm not really happy with the ears, would welcome advice?





A note on colouring the fondant, start off with a really tiny amount of colour. The amount of colour shown in the pic below left was actually too much for this quantity of fondant - I had to add that much fondant again to get the colour down from a very hot pink to a piggy pink. That's why the fondant seems to have 'expanded' in the pic below right.

Oink oink, happy eating - and if you were wondering, OBVIOUSLY all these piggywigs are free range.

In the beginning...

... I was a small girl with a sweet tooth and a cookbook which contained a recipe for fairy cakes. The recipe told you how to mix flour and sugar and eggs together and scrape this mixture into patty cans.

It also said: "Ask Mummy to set the oven to Gas Mark 8."
... and so I did, and she did, and my first batch of cupcakes appeared all hot and fresh from the oven.

Then it said somewhat scarily "Be careful not to eat them when they're still hot, or you may get hiccups."
... I have still never figured out if this is true.

From then on I loved making cakes and I still do. I'm a pretty lazy cook, I only do stuff that I'm interested in, and the only thing I am consistently interested in is baked treats. So that is the focus of this blog in which I'm going to try to document my experiments with cakes, pastries and biscuits. I like to read and see what other cooks are doing or have tried to do, and I often turn to the interwebs to solve cooking problems so hopefully I can help others to do that too!