Chocolate cake leftovers can be fun!

If you ever make a cake or a batch of cupcakes and there is some mixture left over, here's a great tip:

Dr Cupcake's Great Cake Tip #43: NEVER THROW EXTRA MIXTURE AWAY.

Take the Wombles as your role model. If you are as old as me then you'll know that the Wombles, while they were underground, overground, wombling free, were ALSO making good use of the things that they find, the things that the everyday folk leave behind:

Yes indeed. And I bet they were fond of chocolate cake (although I can't say that for sure), and further, I bet you anything you like that, had they had extra cake mixture left over from a batch, they would have turned it into a smaller tin, cooked it, and come out with something..... looking rather like this:

.... looking rather like this:

- Which they would have put in the freezer, slightly flat and unattractive-looking as it was, in the certain knowledge that, ONE DAY SOON, it would find a use.

The Wombles, whilst whipping up a batch of ganache for their last cooking project, and finding that there appeared to be too much ganache for their purposes, would, almost certainly, have done.....

....THIS, and scooped it unattractively into a sandwich bag, to be popped in the freezer for a later event.

And this is exactly what you and I should do, too.....

Because, the very next time you have a special occasion and absolutely no time to make anything fancy, you can rip your little flat cake and your messy ganache out of the freezer and do this with it, and no one will ever know that you haven't slaved over a hot stove for hours making it.

These are, obviously, little squares of rich chocolate mud cake topped with a warm, half-melted ganache and topped with some fancy sugar roses.....

.... Which I had no compunction in getting out of a packet - again, if you have the time, it's wonderful to make them yourself, but if you don't, it is really worthwhile to keep a few ready made ones in the cupboard.

I hand cut the cake squares with a sharp and heavy knife. It helps if the cake is not completely defrosted, or at least still very cold, when cutting - that way it is less crumbly and less likely to break into smaller pieces.

The good thing about the 'dolloped' ganache icing is that it hides any inconsistencies or breakages in the cake squares.

I was lucky enough to have both red and white roses to top the cakes with. The red were my favorites.

And seriously one of the best things about the whole experience was the amount of washing up that I had to do at the end, which was:











Done, finito, from go to whoa in approximately 20 minutes ... and a roomful of appreciative chocolate smeared faces were none the wiser.

So, be like the Wombles, because they're cool and stuff.

Happy wombling from Dr Cupcake!

Ten Epic Cooking Failures from Dr Cupcake and her family

I've had countless cooking disasters. So have most people I know - in fact some of the best stories from my mum and other friends are about when cooking went terribly, horribly wrong.

Funny thing is, all those lovely cookbooks and foodie mags we read seem to describe some weird alternate cooking universe where eggs turn smoothly into custard, oil never catches fire in the frying pan and chocolate never freezes solid when it's supposed to melt. Cooking shows are a bit the same, although I admit Masterchef does have a few recipes for disaster (see what I did there?)

Plus, I had a couple of really weird moments recently when friends of mine told me they were thinking of cooking something sweet but they thought it 'wouldn't be good enough to show me'. I hate the idea that blogging about my cooking experiments might actually discourage people from trying things.

So this is a post dedicated to cooking failures, disaster stories, and tips and tricks for beginners at cooking sweets.

Failure No. 1 - Serving raw meat by accident
When Mum was first going out with Dad, she decided to impress him with her fine cooking skills at a dinner party. She decided to do a Beef Wellington which was big in the 1960s.  It's a long piece of eye fillet steak wrapped in pastry and baked in a hot oven, so that the pastry browns perfectly and the meat inside cooks to a perfect rareness - pink to red inside.
Problem was that Mum got a little confused and purchased Scotch fillet instead of eye fillet. Any difference? Well, yes, because Scotch fillet is about double the size of eye fillet. So instead of a beautiful rare piece of juicy steak, Mum carved at the table, for everyone to see, a massive raw hunk of meat encased in pastry. She was forever grateful to Dad for setting a polite example and manfully chewing his way through raw scotch fillet. Neither of them ever really got over this incident.

Failure No. 2 - Setting yourself on fire in front of the whole family
It was Auntie Petra's turn to host the family Christmas dinner. She had made a traditional plum pudding of which she was rightly proud. Finally the big moment came to flame the pudding. Carefully she heated the brandy and poured a generous quantity over the pudding, where it pooled deeply in the bottom of the dish. Then, with dining room lights turned off, she lit the brandy and began walking quickly in from the kitchen. Too quickly. With the speed of her gait, the flaming brandy slopped all over her hands, then her arms. She shot into the darkened dining room shrieking, with arms, hands and pudding aflame. Luckily, brandy flames at a low temperature, so she wasn't seriously injured, but the rest of the family will never forget Petra and The Pudding.

Failure No. 3 - Setting the kitchen on fire 
I was sixteen and home alone at Dad's flat while he was working late. I decided to make some eggs and bacon for dinner, as you do when you're sixteen, and I got the frying pan onto the heat and poured some oil in it to prepare to cook. Meanwhile, an interesting program on the telly caught my attention, and I strolled into the lounge to check it out.
A few minutes later I became aware of an odd orange light emanating from the bar that linked the kitchen to the lounge. I slouched across, in a teenagery way, to investigate and discovered that the entire wall of the kitchen was covered in flames. The plastic exhaust fan was melting into the frying pan, all the wood cupboards were blackening and starting to catch. I was strongly tempted by the option of running, screaming, for the front door and leaving it to burn, but I did feel a bit guilty at the thought of burning Dad's house down. So I bravely dumped a full box of flour on the source of the fire and batted the other flames with a wet teatowel. I caught it just in time. The smell of charcoal, burnt flour and melted plastic was truly awful. I retired to Mum's house and left a note on Dad's door with the immortal words, "Hi Dad. It's not as bad as it looks. Love Astrid.'

Failure No. 4 - The cat sat on it
It was Dad's 50th birthday and Mum was fired up to make a meringue and buttercream layer cake, with the meringue layers piped into the letters '5' and '0'. Everything was going swimmingly. The delicate meringue layers formed the numbers perfectly, and Mum stacked them in between sheets of baking paper in a stack on our kitchen table.
We popped out to get the final decorative touches before the cake was assembled. By the time we returned, Lord Henry Wootton, in his inscrutable feline way, had discovered the meringue stack. The combination of softness and crinkly paper proved irrestistable and he created a nest for himself by crushing all the meringue to fit perfectly around his plump form. Ww found him there dozing peacefully when we returned. The meringue was ruined.

Failure No. 5 - Chili can burn your lips off  (part 1)
Mum and her half indian boyfriend (pre-Dad) went to an Indian restaurant. They liked spicy food and prided themselves on being able to handling chili better than most. The waiter encouraged them to go for a medium hot curry, but they declared, perhaps a little dramatically, that they could cope with any and all chili. The resulting meal (which they had to eat, to save face) left blisters around Mum's lips. Ouch.

Failure No. 6 - Chili can burn your lips off  (part 2)
When staying with a friend overseas I offered to cook a delicious szechuan bean curd dish for my host and his friend. I had cooked it many times and knew the recipe backwards. I went shopping and bought my critical ingredients - hoisin, bean and chili bean sauces. Confident in my recipe, I also failed to taste the dish before I served it.
My pleasure at doing a good deed for my host turned to fascinated horror as I saw his face change into a grimace of pure pain and he rushed from the room after one mouthful. I had assumed that the sauces I used  in Australia were exactly equivalent in chili levels as they were in Hawaii. Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong, and I'd put enough chili in my recipe to kill people.

Failure No. 7 - Don't put all your eggs in one basket
Many people say that when you are using eggs for cooking, you should break them one by one into a little bowl, then add them to your main mixing bowl, in case by chance you get a bad egg. After doing this for years and never getting a bad egg, I dispensed with this unnecessary step and just broke all my eggs straight into the main bowl.
Shortly afterwards I was making a cake which required five eggs. I had six in the fridge - excellent. I cracked the first four in the bowl - no problems. When I cracked the fifth, a hideous smell permeated the entire kitchen and a black slimy egg slopped into my mixture. I had to (a) dispose of the now stinking mixture and (b) go out to get more eggs.

Failure No. 8 - Trying to poison your friends more than once
I had a dear friend in my student days who was the easiest-going guy on the planet. He was a muso and looked like a Viking God and was also incredibly nice. One small thing, he was allergic to seafood. Not a big deal, because who eats seafood all the time when you're a poor student?
I often had people round for dinner. Bizarrely, whenever Adam came, I served seafood. It happened at least four times. My memory is fine. I am a considerate person. I knew about his allergy. I still can't understand why I consistently nearly poisoned one of my best friends. If you're reading this, Adam - sorry, man.

Failure No. 9 - Flying across the kitchen (in a bad way)
Another awesome story of Mum's and far less likely to happen these days, because gas stoves have a different kind of gas in them than they did in the 1960s which was when this tale occurred. Mum tried to turn on and heat up the oven, but the flame went out. The gas, of course, did not - it kept hissing into the oven like billy-o. Mum tries valiantly to light the oven again, and was just a little delayed by the match failing to strike... finally a lit match was thrust into the oven... and BOOM! Mum was blown across the kitchen by the blast and lost her eyebrows and eyelashes. She was otherwise uninjured apart from a heavy blow to her chef's pride.

Failure No. 10 - Drinking and cooking do not mix
This reflects quite badly on me but I'll tell it anyway. I had my new boyfriend over for dinner for the very first time. I didn't want to go too formal, and I wanted something that would resemble 'man food' without going to the lengths of cooking a big steak, which I'm not really that crash hot at, having been vegetarian for six years or so. So I settled on the perfect first-date-dinner, an easy-cook, man-food special: BEEF TACOS.
Now, tacos in a packet from the supermarket are ridiculously easy to cook, indeed, I would have said they were pretty much impossible to screw up. I fried off some beef mince with onions and added the spice mix; I prepared, in advance, the shredded lettuce, grated cheese, sour cream, salsa with fresh tomatoes chopped through it. The beef mince was keeping warm in a pan on the stove and everything else was in attractive little bowls, ready to dip into for some last-minute, easy taco assemblage. Nothing could go wrong.
New boyfriend arrives, and I'd already had a stiff drink or two because I was a bit nervous. Everything was going swimmingly, except that I ended up having another drink... then another.. then another until by the time I came to actually serve up the tacos, I was pretty well sozzled. All I had to do was heat up the taco shells in the oven. Which I did... using the whole lot at once, and drunkenly setting the oven at 220C (nuclear explosion temperature) and then forgetting, until a burning smell became apparent, that I'd even put them in. I BURNT THE TACO SHELLS. Yes, you too can become an idiot when the appropriate amount of alcohol is involved.
The only positive thing about this incident was the priceless text message the new boyfriend received the next morning which he still snickers about : "I burnt the tacos and passed out on the couch, are you sure you want to see me again?"

Dr Cupcake's Savoury Muffin Odyssey

As you know, Dr Cupcake is very fond of sweet things. But sometimes, only a savoury something can really hit the spot. My savoury muffin odyssey began one week ago on a sunny Sunday afternoon, when I had a hankering for the sort of savoury muffin that, in my innocence, I thought would be found in every recipe book on earth: a light, tasty, warm and flavoursome treat packed with little bits of cheese, herbs and other delicious things, that would be ideal when roughly torn up and spread with butter. Something like this:

Imagine my horrified surprise when I looked through a good dozen cookbooks and came up with NOTHING. Nigella let me down badly. Bill Grainger - nothing. Jamie Oliver? NOTHING. Okay, I thought, maybe muffins are an American thing: I turned to the American goddess of home cookery and all-round domestic goodness, Martha Stewart. Martha had NOTHING!!

In desperation I went to my CWA binder-file cookbook. Surely the good ladies of the Country Womens Association would be on top of this one. Know what? If they are, they aren't sharing.
By this time I was getting very frustrated, but I had the interwebs, so I googled 'savoury muffins' and came up with a bundle of recipes, most of which sounded actually rather unpleasant. There was only one thing left to do. Make one up. So that's what I did. And that's what, in the interests of happy tummies everywhere, I am now going to share with you.

Dr Cupcake's Bestest Ever Savoury Muffin Recipe

2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons salted butter
1 cup plain (greek-style) yoghurt, or the same quantity of sour cream
1/2 cup milk
1 cup of the following chopped combined ingredients: sundried tomatoes, crumbled feta, black olives, chives, italian parsley
Small handful of grated cheddar or tasty cheese (optional)

Notes on the ingredients: You can substitute a good, balanced gluten free flour mix for the flour if you are gluten free but the miffins may have a shorter shelf life. You could substitute olive oil for the butter. For the flavourings, really I just thought of the flavours I wanted and threw them in - you should do the same.

Set oven to 175C. Melt the butter in a small saucepan and set aside.

You'll need two mixing bowls, one for the dry ingredients and one for the wet ingredients.

In one, put the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar and mix well.

In the other, break the eggs and whisk them together, then add the yoghurt, melted butter and milk.

Whisk all the wet ingredients until you get a smooth, creamy pale mixture. Then turn this into the dry ingredients and give it all a good stir to combine it well.

This is a selection of the ingredients I put in for the flavouring, and I could try to persuade you that they were all carefully selected but it would be more truthful to say they were "whatever I could find in the fridge at the time". Therefore I had half a brunch of fresh (ish) chives, half a wedge of beautiful handmade Elgaar farm marinated feta, a tub of black olives from the supermarket and the remains of a packet of grated tasty cheese left over from the pizza three days ago. Glamorous? Oh yes.

Here you can see my muffin mixture with the ingredients on top - I chopped the olives roughly, crumbled the feta, chopped the chives into the bowl with scissors and then added my SECRET (well, not so much now) ingredient: Gerwurzhaus 'Venetian Gondola Spice'. This is a mixture of onion, garlic, bell pepper, sea salt, parsley and pepper - well, that's what it says on the label, but this stuff tastes absolutely amazing - all I know is, there's a ton of umami in this little baby. Look for it online, you won't be disappointed.

After you've given the mixture a good mix, and distributed the flavourings evenly, dollop the mixture into muffin cases, as you see here. Don't fill them all the way up because they will rise.

Put them in the oven for about 20 minutes, but check them after 15 minutes. When they're risen and golden, and a skewer stuck into the middle of one comes out clean, they're done.

One warning - they do stick to the paper cases. If this is likely to bother you, either grease the paper before dolloping the mixture in, or dispense with the paper cases and oil the tin really well.





Serve with lashings of butter while still warm - or keep them in an airtight container for a few days - just warm them gently in the oven before you eat them.

With love from Dr Cupcake!!

Polka dot heart cookies for Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

These are very dark chocolate cookies (or biscuits if you prefer) with royal icing and the occasional cachou.

The awesome thing about royal icing for cookies is that it sets rock hard, so you can pack them in layers and move them. I guess I'm really saying it's a very practical type of decoration. But - unlike shoes, which can only ever be one or the other - that doesn't mean they can't be pretty.

I started off doing polka dots but got a little creative and did a few other patterns using the same basic colours.

This type of decoration requires royal icing of two different consistencies: line icing (around the edge to hold everything else in place) and flooding icing (everything else).

First to the cookie: I used a 'Super Chocolatey Biscuits' recipe from the Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits - in fact you'll know if you see this book around because there is a polka-dotted heart cookie just like this one on the front cover. Great book. GREAT book.

Ingredients:
275g plain flour
100g self raising flour
75g cocoa
125g granulated sugar (I used caster, it was fine)
125g salted butter, diced
125g golden syrup
I large egg

Sift the flours and the cocoa into a large bowl, then add the sugar and mix well. Rub the cubes of butter into the dry mixture with your fingers until you get a consistency like moist breadcrumbs.

Make a well in the centre and pour in the golden syrup and the egg (okay, yes I forgot to beat the egg before I added it - so sue me).

Gently mix everything together just until it forms a solid ball of dough. Then turn this out onto your benchtop.

My dough wouldn't come together properly at first so I added a little more golden syrup until it did. I think this was because the eggs I used weren't huge - just be aware that the actual quantities of the recipe are not as important as the  look and feel of it. You need to end up with a smooth, solid dough - adjust the quantities if you need to.

Divide the dough into two equal parts and wrap both in clingfilm. Place one part in the fridge while you roll out the other part.

Rolling out the dough can be tricky - the best way is to roll it out between a piece of baking paper and a piece of clingfilm. You then use the rolling pin over the top of the clingfilm. It will be a hard dough to work, you need to press firmly and evenly until you get it to about 5mm thick.
When it's at this stage, lift the dough still in the baking paper and clingfilm onto a baking tray and pop it in the fridge for 15 minutes or so before you cut the heart shapes - it's supposed to be for longer than that, but I get impatient.

Stamp the shapes out with heart cutters. I have a set of these so I was able to do about five different sizes but you could do them all one size, it wouldn't matter. I found the dough stuck to the cutters a little and had to be gently eased out of them. Put the cut-out hearts onto a baking tray lined with baking paper, leaving at least a centimetre of clearance around each shape. You can re-roll the offcuts or gather them up and shape them into a ball and keep the dough for later.

When you've filled the tray, place it back in the fridge for half an hour. This prevents the dough from rising and distorting too much during the baking process. Preheat the oven to 170C. Bake the biscuits for 14-18 minutes (check after 14) until the biscuits look firm and cooked and slightly darker in colour.Gently lift each shape onto a rack with a spatula and leave until completely cool.

Icing time yay! Now, you could use a home made royal icing, and if I was really a decent cook I guess I wouldn't mind making one, but to be honest there's a packet mix available in every supermarket that is just as good and ten times easier. So save your energy and time for the decoration and use the packet mix (if you want a recipe for royal icing there are plenty on the interwebs).

You need two batches of icing: first the line icing. The consistency of this needs to be quite thick but not so thick that you can't pipe it - something like the consistency of very thick pure cream, or maybe slightly thicker. If you're unsure, keep it thick and test it in a piping bag - can you pipe it in a thin line? If not, thin it down until you can pipe a thin, hard solid line with no gaps.

Secondly you need to make a batch of flooding icing, which is thinner - you can make this, obviously, from your line icing by simply adding a little more water. The consistency of flooding icing needs to be like pouring cream.

You then need to tint the icing - I kept half the flooding icing white and tinted half of it rose pink, and I tinted the line icing pink.

So then you need to load the line icing into a piping bag. I always use disposable piping bags because I hate washing out canvas piping bags and also I don't really trust that you can ever get them totally clean, so for hygiene reasons it's just best to go the disposable option.

Snip off a tiny end piece of the piping bag and pipe a thin line inside the edge of the cookie. I was trying to make these lines as smooth and parallel to the edge as possible, but it takes a bit of practice and a very steady hand.

I used squeeze bottles for the thinner flooding icing. So for the flooding, just aim inside the lines. Easy....

... Or is it? This is what happens when the flood overtops the levee banks. Disaster.

I discovered that this can happen for two reasons (I guess they're both obvious). The first is that you put too much flooding icing on, and it just gets too high to be held back by the line icing. The second is that you damage the line icing somehow, either in piping or subsequently. This particular cookie was ruined because I brushed the edge of the line with my finger and shifted it. Goddamn.

You can rescue this disaster by waiting for the icing to harden a little and cutting the excess away.....

... But you can't rescue it when it has pulled all the pattern off with it!
D'oh.

Ok so let's get away from the disasters and back to the plot... you've managed to get the line icing sort of straight, and the flooding icing inside the lines. This is how it looks at that stage.

I thought I took a picture of polka dots being made but I can't find it, so you'll just have to imagine. The white flooding icing was in another squeeze bottle with a small circular nozzle. You need to hold the bottle vertically and squeeze very gently until a tiny drop of white icing falls onto the pink surface. It will spread a bit so don't put the dots too close to each other.

The stripe pattern starts the same way, with a plain pink flooding. The white flooding icing is piped in vertical stripes. Well, sort of vertical anyway.

I did a couple of these heart-within-a-heart shapes but I didn't like them very much because it was hard to do them accurately.

I used plain white flooding icing decorated with pink cachous for some of the smaller cookies. I really liked these because the pink line icing was just visible at the edges and it added an extra degree of detail - obviously in the shapes flooded with pink, the pink line icing is all but invisible.


Happy Valentine's Day everyone ... may you have a wonderful, happy, romantic, awesome day!

Christmas cupcakes 2: Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer

If you've made Santa cupcakes (see here) then you really need to make some reindeer to help the poor ole guy out. This is Rudolph.

Rudolph looks a bit worried. I think that's entirely reasonable, it's his busiest time of year after all.

I made a strategic error when planning these cupcakes. I thought that red as a background colour would look suitably bright and Christmas-y. But with a red background, Rudolph's beautiful red nose doesn't really glow like it should. I would have been better to do a dark green background.

Oh well - there's always next year.

For Rudolph's face, you need to roll out some dark brown fondant. You can get this pre-coloured and chocolate flavoured and that's what I used here.

Cut out some circles approximately one third to half the size of the top of your cupcake, then use a slightly larger circle cutter to take two elliptical 'bites' out of the sides of the circle, as shown in this picture. You're aiming for an hourglass shape that is wider at the top than the bottom.

Once you've made the cuts, round the corners by hand until you have a smooth shape. This will be Rudolph's head.

Stick the head onto the top of the cupcake, leaving a little more room above it than below it (remember you need to fit the antlers above the head). Fix it with a few drops of water.

Here are all the cupcakes with heads on.

Roll two little balls of white fondant and stick them on - these are Rudolph's eyes. Make little holes in the centres so that you can stick the pupils on.

A little tip to help you make a pair of eyes that are exactly the same size: Roll a ball of fondant larger than you need, then cut it in half exactly with a sharp knife and re-roll two separate fondant balls. This way they will be exactly the same size.

Roll two very small balls of black fondant and stick them into the indentations in the 'eyeballs' with a tiny drop of water. Beware if you use too much water next to black fondant, the colour will run.

Roll a ball of red fondant for the nose and stick it in place.

I suddenly realised after I'd made these that there should really be only one Rudolph with a red nose, the other reindeer should all have black noses. So if you wanted to be more historically accurate (if you can say that about reindeer pulling a fat man's sleigh through the air all around the world in one night) you could do seven black-nosed reindeer and one beautiful, shiny red-nosed one.

For the antlers, I used a leaf cutter, cutting out a leaf shape and then slicing it in half vertically and 'feathering' the straight edge with a sharp knife. In this pic you can see the cutter on the right, then the leaf shape and on the left you can see the finished antlers.

Fix the antlers in place and decorate the edges with some cachous if you feel like it. They provide a bit of colour variation and they are nice and shiny. I wanted to use green ones but I only had a kind of aqua colour. I like to think they look green though.

All the little Rudolphs looked rather frightened. I love how they're all looking worriedly in different directions, like they're not sure exactly what they should be scared of, but they're keeping a close eye on everything.

Merry Christmas from Dr Cupcake!!

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!!