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| The Gingerbread Train |
An impromptu FUN project completed today by Bean and fabulous baker helpers, Henry, Patrick and Charlie.
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| Baker's ready for action, aprons and hats on. Okay not official baker hats but tea cozies work well! |
Henry decided early this morning that he wanted to design a gingerbread house only it was going to be a train. Okay I said, have at it. Ten minutes later Henry finished his drawing of the gingerbread train.
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| The train plan, Henry drew arrows with the steam to show which way it was supposed to blow. |
Now we needed a mock up, fortunately Patrick and Charlie had finished off the Weetabix this morning so we had a nice size piece of cardboard to work with. After some measuring, cutting, taping and gluing we had a mock up of our gingerbread train.
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| The "weetabix" train mock up. |
Next it was time to make the gingerbread, a monstrosity mixture of molasses, spices, butter, eggs, brown sugar and sixteen cups of flour. We combined, mixed, kneaded, and then wrapped the massive quantity of dough in wax paper and moved it to the refrigerator for half an hour. Then we rolled the dry mixture into two large baking sheets and baked for thirty minutes.
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| Henry the gingerbread train designer. |
The gingerbread has to be cut while it is very warm from the oven, using our mock up we cut to size all the pieces that we needed for assembly. The bread cooled and next we prepared a very stiff mix of icing to cement the train together. I then thinned the icing a little and we went to town decorating the gingerbread train with all kinds of candy, we ate some candy too :)
