#but you could also use the ginger powder in the spice aisle

[ladyurticariathinblood]

Drew some chai the other day. I've been playing a lot of Coffee Talk- it's a chill game where you serve hot drinks to fantasy creatures. That inspired me to make hot drinks in real life, which inspired me to make for myself a recipe book of my favorites (hot drinks yes, but also food). And at least some of my recipes need illustrations, or what is anything even for.

2nd pic is the printout of the chai recipe I've used, on aged-looking paper. If you want to try making chai yourself, it's really not hard! The recipe I used is from here. All the spices are in the spice aisle at the grocery store. I didn’t have a mortar and pestle, but I used a meat tenderizer hammer thing to cromch the spices, which is the important part. Makes your house smell great too.

[secondhand-trash]

Christmas Every Day

Ficmas day 4 aka 3 days till Christmas qwq

A/N: Oh hello, can you see the image of me struggling because I had no idea how to write a purely wholesome fic while being ridiculously behind on progress?qwq

Pairing: Midoriya Izuku x reader

Description: You didn’t care much about Christmas and your boyfriend was determined to change that.

Word count: 1835

I'm gonna tell you to listen to the Simple Plan version because I like that band and you should too

-

Unpopular opinion, but Christmas was really nothing special.

There, you said it. Were people gonna come for you now? It’s not that you hate it, you just didn’t get what’s the big deal about it. There were so many traditions and activities that people fussed about and literally every single shop out there was using it as a cash grab. 

It was nice that people could get into the festive cheer so easily and good for them but you just didn’t get the hype.

Your boyfriend on the other hand, was absolutely shocked when you nonchalantly told him that you didn’t care much about Christmas.

“What do you mean ‘Christmas is not important to me’?” Izuku’s eyes were nearly the size of the moon as he squealed. Unlike you, he adored all things Christmas. Everything was so changed up this time of the year and everyone was just so happy. He didn’t grow up in the wealthiest household, being only his mom and him, but Inko would always put extra effort into making something special for the holiday dinner each year and splurge a little to get him the things that he had wanted but didn’t have the heart to ask for.

Izuku associated Christmas with some of the happiest times in his life and he couldn’t believe that an occasion so special to him was just another day for you.

You shrugged, not quite bothered by Izuku’s bewilderment. “I don’t know,” you said, “I guess it’s just not something that I grow up to place a lot of value on.”

“But... but you do celebrate,” he asked with a tilt of his head, “right?”

“Eh. Not really from what I can recall.” You laughed when you looked at Izuku and saw that he looked like the fact that you didn’t like Christmas all that much was still processing in his head. You poked the side of his shoulder, “It’s fine! We can still do festive stuff together if you want to...”

“That’s not what I’m trying to say!” He exclaimed and grabbed your shoulders. You narrowed your eyes at him, your puzzled look a very sharp contrast to his agitated expression. The fact that he had such pure passion for things he loved was one of the many things that drawn you to Izuku in the first place but you really didn’t think you had seen him so emotional about something outside of heroism before. “So you just... don’t do things for Christmas? Not at all?”

You shook your head and he gasped. “That needs to change right now.”

“Huh?”

His mind was going at a speed that you couldn’t keep up with but although you had no idea where the conversation was going, that spark in his eyes still managed to catch you off guard.

You would give Midoriya Izuku everything you ever had just for that look on his face.

“You are celebrating with me this year.” He said with a wide grin and a look of determination that you didn’t have the heart to say no to.

“Izuku I love you but I’m not sure about that...”

“It’ll go wonderfully,” he beamed at you as he stood up, pulling you with him, “just you see, you’ll fall in love with Christmas in no time.”

Leaning yourself on the handle of the cart, you watched as Izuku browsed through the shelves. “’Zuku why are we here?” You asked, looking around the walls of spices. 

Mumbling under his breath, he stopped when he heard your question. “Buying ingredients for cookies, of course!”

Humming in response, you shrugged. Cookies were great no matter what time of the year it was. If his plans on making you love Christmas includes bribing you with sugary treats then maybe you would be down.

Your eyes widened as you saw him dumping jars of ginger powder and cloves into the cart. “Woah, woah. Calm down there. Do we really need that many?”

Glancing at the scribbles on his list, you questioned if you had made a mistake when you saw that all the ingredients were labelled in shockingly high numbers. Was he trying to feed a village? “It says so in the recipe.” he said as he took another look at the recipe he had written down in his notebook.

“Alright then.” Your eyebrows quirked up as you pushed the cart to follow Izuku to the next aisle where the sugar was put. It’s his idea after all, you were sure that he had it all planned out.

Placing the heavy bags on the kitchen counter, you looked around as Izuku rummaged through the kitchen for the utensils. His house was very average, not too big and just enough. There were pictures of him and his mom around the house everywhere. “It’s not much, but it’s home.” He had sheepishly said to you the first time he brought you back to meet his mother who immediately welcomed you with opened arms. It was a warm house and you could feel the amount of care that Inko went and put into creating the best environment she could for her son.

Warm and loving, no wonder why Izuku grew up to be the wonderful person he was. 

Peering from behind his shoulder, you watched with interest as he rolled his sleeves up and opened the recipe book. It seemed to be very well-used, with folds on the corner of the cover and many sticky notes poking out from the ridge. AS he flipped it open, you could see just which dishes were the family favourite at the many pages that were kept from falling apart by tape.

For the most part, you two just followed the recipe step by step. Getting slightly bored, you swiped a streak of flour onto his freckled cheeks and laughed when he whined at you to stop. Jokingly defending himself, he retaliated by smearing the half mixed batter across your forehead. “Can you not? Baking is a serious business here.” He pouted to which you only chuckled in response and bopped the tip of his nose despite his protest, leaving yet another while finger print on him. 

You still didn’t care much about the ‘Christmas’ aspect of the cookies, baked goods were in season at all times. But at least seeing your boyfriend desperately trying to focus while you messed around with him was fun.

By the end of the little baking session, the smell of ginger and cinnamon filled the air. Your suspicion was proved to be correct when you rolled out the dough to find that you had made way too much batches for just the two of you. Scratching the back of his head in embarrassment, Izuku suggested that he would bring some to a nearby shelter the next day to avoid all the perfectly fine gingerbread from going to waste. 

Waiting for the cookies to bake, you were lying on the couch with Izuku when you heard the sound of the key turning at the door. You sat up from the couch to see Inko opening the door, carrying bags and bags of groceries. Immediately getting up to help his mother with the luggage, you went up to the woman and she immediately pulled you into a tight hug when Izuku took the bags off her arms.

Pulling back, she cupped your cheek with one hand and smiled as she inspected your face. “It’s been a while, good to see that you’re looking as good as ever!”

“You too, mrs...”

“Inko.” She teasingly scolded you.

“Sorry, Inko.” You smiled.

You liked Inko. The first time you came to his house, you were fidgeting the whole time because you knew that Izuku was very close with his mom and you desperately wanted her to approve of you. To your relief, Inko took an immediate liking to you when her son introduced you and had treated you like her own ever since.

“Sit down, I’ll call you two once dinner is ready.” She slid her hands down your shoulders and gave them a soft squeeze.

“Do you need help with the cooking?” You could heard your boyfriend’s voice from the kitchen.

“No, no need.” Inko said as she made way to the kitchen and shooed his son out with a wink, “You two love birds go hang out.”

Izuku plopped down next to you on the couch with a faint blush on his face. Listening to the sounds of chopping and the starting of the stove, you laid your head on his shoulder and played with the tip of his fluffy green hair.

“Are you feeling even just a little bit convinced?” That look of excitement in your eyes when the timer for the cookies when off didn’t escape his attentive gaze.

“Hm,” you pondered as you looked up at him, “I guess not quite? It’s fun, but I still don’t get what’s so special about Christmas as a whole?”

As he was about to say something, he was cut off by Inko calling out from the kitchen. “Dinner’s ready!”

Dinner was wonderful. Inko made stew and even brought out an entire rotisserie chicken. It was clear evident that Izuku was Inko’s son because she also cooked way too much. You didn’t really think you had witness true nature of motherhood until she forcibly put food in your bowl many times despite you kept saying that you were full. 

Inko, being the loving mom she was, kept unintentionally embarrassing her son by talking about how cute you two were and how Izuku would gush about you to her when you’re not around all the time. Watching him trying to stop his mom from going on with flailing arms and stuttered blabbering. 

It was like you were eating with your own family and if that’s what Christmas feels like in his house, you could kind of start to understand just why Izuku loved Christmas so much.

“So...” Izuku asked you with a badly concealed anticipation in his eyes as he walked you back from his house.

You laughed, “Why are you so insisted on getting me to like Christmas?” You had enjoyed yourself that day but at your age, it was far too late for you to truly change the way you view the holidays entirely.

“I guess Christmas is something that brings me a lot of joy,” he said with his head slightly lowered, “and I want you to feel that type of giddiness that it brings me as well.”

He let out a small laugh and you almost felt bad. “But I guess it didn’t work as well as I thought it would, huh?”

Gripping his chin, a small squeal when you pressed a quick kiss to his lips. You craddled his cheeks and smiled at how flustered he was. It didn’t matter when or what occasion it was, you would still feel giddy for whatever he did.

“Don’t worry about it. When I’m with you, it feels like Christmas every day.”

[sexyshakespeare]

Sasuke comes home - Part 3: You’re special to me

“Man, that cockroach was huge..”, I muttered to myself. It was the third of the day. This kitchen sure was filthy. I had managed to clean out the cabinets under the sink and the sink itself. The stove was wiped down with soap and dried.The fridge needed some serious sponging. Thankfully, I had cleaning supplies in the closet. I was a very proper, clean kid once upon a time. Living in an underground cave and on the road for the rest of my life had shot a bullet through that side of me. I had temporarily started to live like a dirty vagabond because, a dirty vagabond I was.  But now, it was time to revel in wiping down refrigerator gunk. That’s depressing. I sighed woefully as I removed the shelves from the fridge and scrubbed them down with soap water. The whole process must have taken at least an hour to do. Should I have just gone and bought another fridge..  I observed my work of art, a little smirk showing on my lips. With a sense of finality, I reached over and turned on the power to the fridge. I had had the good sense to check the power first of course, and as expected, it hummed to life.  After a quick mop and wipe of the counters, I was ready to hit the market for groceries. I quickly washed up and headed to the village produce market.   Everywhere around me I saw supermarkets and convenience stores. There were a few obasan selling vegetables off to the side, but too few in comparison. I went into one supermarket, feeling strange.  I, Uchiha Sasuke was wheeling a trolley down the vegetables aisle looking for carrots. I felt several pairs of eyes on me as I picked out tomatoes. I got myself some potatoes while another lady busily picked some out too. She handed me a larger potato that she didn’t need in exchange for two small ones from my basket. It calmed me, this simple act, I don’t really know why.  When I was done with vegetables, I went to get myself some condiments and spices. Shoyu was a must, as was sweet vinegar. A little boy came running into the aisle. We both stood side by side looking at all the different spices in little bottles. We both looked on with awe. As he reached for the chilli, I picked it up and handed it to him. “Arigato Sasuke san!”, he yelled cheerfully and ran back the way he had come.  Does everybody know who I am? I got conscious suddenly and readjusted my bangs, making sure to cover up that weird eye. Well, my other eye was weird too put apparently not as weird. I really really really don’t want a kid coming up to me asking to see my Sharingan. I groaned slightly at the possibility and suddenly wished I had just asked one of Kakashi’s chunins to do the shopping. 

I wheeled my cart towards the cashier as fast as I could. As the young woman billed me she said, “Do you cook Sasuke-san?”, beaming at me as she did. I muttered quietly in the affirmative, pretending to be busy picking out the change from my wallet. I grabbed my bags and headed back towards my shitty little flat.  It was about 6 pm on a Saturday. The Saturday that Sakura would be coming over. And bringing things for the apartment. And having dinner with me. And..  My eyes widened with panic. She’s coming to my home. This was very poorly planned. What would we talk about. What happens after dinner, do I just ask her to leave? Will she leave on her own? Dinner guests tended to leave on their own, right? I couldn’t bear to ask her to leave. What if we just talked all night and she fell asleep here. How much would we even talk, that’s not possible. 

I started to wash and cut the vegetables. I had bought some duck as well at the poultry shop next door. I set about cutting off its head and draining the blood from the body. Before I went ahead, I put on an apron I had bought. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any other kinds of aprons at the combini. I felt like an idiot, but it didn’t matter right now. Kiss the shinobi cook would have to do. 

Ridiculous. Itachi used to make duck roast for us when our parents were away. It would take him exactly 3 hours during which he’d get all the sides done. I smiled at the fond memories flooding my mind. I left the skin on the potatoes and cut them the way he’d taught me to. I remembered cutting my pinky finger once while doing this chore. 

Niisan, make chocolate pudding now. Itte ittee. You have to make it now cause it’s my favourite. 

Sasuke! Did you cut yourself just so I’d make that. Seriously, you’re such a- 

Niiiisaaaaaan- 

With a large grin on my face, I started on the sauce. The cut vegetables were boiling. I put in shoyu, chilli powder and vinegar and let it simmer. The duck needed to be cut up, washed and basted. After about half an hour had passed, I put the readied duck breast and legs in the oven. I’d add in the vegetables after about an hour. While the duck cooked, I put some rice in the little steamer I had borrowed from Hinata. I’d fry it up with some ginger to flavour it, to go with the duck.  The clock showed 8 pm before long. The last leg of the preparations was in motion. The duck was sitting with its vegetables, the fatty juices bubbling and bathing them. I took out the duck pieces and put them in the fry pan to glaze with the now cooled sauce. The smells in the kitchen were making me mad with hunger. I contemplated eating a leg or two, nothing she would notice- but then settled for some cola from the fridge. 

At 8:45 pm, the duck, rice and miso soup were ready, sitting on the kitchen counter. I wiped down and brought out plates and chopsticks for us. Carefully, I set the plates down on the little table, the glasses for water, the chopsticks. I even bought napkins for us, the nice smooth velvety kind. I arranged the duck and rice on the table, leaving a bowl of miso each on either side. For a minute or two, I kept fidgeting with the duck breast, aligning it one way or the other. Taking a sharp breath in, I saw the time was 9:05 PM. As I stared at that dusty grey, rectangular clock on the wall I suddenly realized that I had forgotten dessert. Kussoo. I looked up at the ceiling in despair, wishing I had made that chocolate pudding. I would have loved to eat it after this tiring day.  Then I heard a knock on the door. My head snapped in its direction and I immediately walked towards it. Taking a deep breath, I wondered if I should open it with a smile, or if I ought to say something the second I opened it. There you are! or I hope you like duck! No, that would be stupid. Just open the fucking door.  I quietly opened the front door and saw an anxious faced Sakura standing before me. Her hair was put up in a little bun, little chunks of her hair fanning around it, loose strands falling to her neck. Her neck. She was wearing a dress, no sleeves. Her neck was very visible right now.  “Sasuke-kun?”

The color of her dress matched her eyes well, I thought. It was a jade green, her dress. Her neckline went lower than I’ve ever seen. 

“Sasuke-kun.. can I come in..?”  I suddenly snapped out of it and realized that I hadn’t said a word to her for a while now. I now noticed that she had bags on the floor next to her, with little frames and things sticking out. “OH- yeah. Sorry. Come in..”, I managed to say. She started to pick up her things, and I helped her. 

We carried the bags to the couch. “What’s all this?”, I asked her curiously. She beamed at me. “Why they’re for your apartment of course! You asked me to brighten up the place.. right?” 

I started to take out the things from their bags, smiling at them, when in fact I was smiling because she had remembered. Sakura looked embarrassed as I pulled out framed photos of cat after cat, all cartoons or paintings. “Um- it’s a sort of neko overload- sorry”, she said. I started smiling wider as I pulled out a shuriken shape. “Is this for the wall? To hang?”  She nodded gleefully. “I mean. We could have just hung up an old shuriken of yours, but I figured you’d rather use that in actual battle than put it on a wall...”, she explained in a quick breath. 

I found a bundle of cloth in one of the bags that I unfolded. “Oh- perfect. I needed curtains.” 

“You like them? I’m sorry, all they had were Sakura prints-”

I looked at her and smiled. “Red and black are some of my favourite colours-” I stood up and put the curtain against the window to show her. The little sakura flowers were red on a black background. She smiled at my reaction and pointed at the rest of the stuff, starting to apologize again. 

“I really love them. Thank you for getting them for me. The cats are- great. Really..”, I chuckled and tapped the cartoon of a chubby calico. She laughed too.  Then her gaze went to the table with the food on it. Her eyes swallowed in every detail it seemed, which made me nervous. She stood up slowly and turned to me. “You made all of that.. for tonight?”  I felt my cheeks burning and looked away from her eyes, “Yeah.. I hope it tastes good-” She was looking straight at me now. I couldn’t help but make eye contact. Her eyes sparkled as they trailed from my face to my chest. I felt extremely conscious all of a sudden, and also like my chest was ugly for some reason.  She was struggling not to laugh, but a little giggle escaped her pink lips anyway. “That’s a cute apron..”  I stared at her for a second or two, slowly processing what she was referring to. Her lips pulled in different directions as she bit them, to stop the laughter. Then it dawned on me. I quickly put my hands on my chest and scrunched up the cloth to hide it, blushing severely as I did. I started to remove the apron and tried my best to sound dignified, “The stupid shop didn’t have normal aprons so I had to take this silly fucking thing.”  “NO it’s-it’s really cute. Just.. doesn’t go with-you..”, Sakura giggled some more, some strands of hair falling over her face as she shook with laughter. I looked at her, wanting to touch her hair again, smiling at her laughing. There wasn’t a purer sound in the world than that.  “The food will get cold. Let’s eat.”, I said and pulled out a chair for her. I sat opposite her. “Itadakimasu”, we both said in unison and started on our soup. I served her some of the duck and rice with it. “OISHII! SASUKE-KUN! YOU COOK LIKE THIS? WHY HAVEN’T YOU EVER TOLD ME!”  I looked at her, surprised at her reaction. She tended to be loud. “Uh-Yeah I guess. I really haven’t cooked a lot in my life..”, I shrugged it off, not wanting to talk about myself too much. It was strange to be under the spotlight, even if it was a small spotlight between two people at dinner.  “It’s so good, I want to die!”, she said with her mouth full of rice. A grain or two fell out of her mouth and she patted at it with the napkin, looking embarrassed. That made me smile a little too much. She must have thought I was laughing at her. I really hope she didn’t think that.  As we ate our meal, I was panicking slightly. I didn’t know what to talk about. Small dinner banter was really not my thing. I looked up at her from time to time to gauge her mood. She seemed to be in a pleasant mood, but I couldn’t read anything else. She also looked up at me from time to time and smiled. All the things I ought to be saying and all the things I could be saying were flashing through my mind. Instead my eyes strayed to her neckline again. 

In an instant, Sakura’s napkin fell off the side of the table. I was about to pick it up when she stopped me and proceeded to do so herself. That’s when I saw her leg come out of a slit in her dress. I could not for the life of me pull my eyes away. Oh God, you’re being creepy. At least say something while you check her out. Don’t just stare.  I really could not be bothered to come up with something to say at the moment. I could barely manage to chew my food straight. Sakura straightened up and continued to eat. She looked so beautiful in that dress and I hadn’t even worn a nice shirt for the occasion. 

She really did look beautiful. It was a strange feeling, to notice that in a woman. I had noticed it about her before, but this was different. This was very pointedly about her appearance. 

My thoughts went back to when Karin used to dress provocatively around me. That couldn’t have just been coincidence like I had imagined then. She had made some advances too. But it hadn’t fazed me in the least. It was so strange, the difference- how I had felt nothing biting into that woman’s neck, and how I felt just looking at Sakura’s neck right now.  I felt so horrible for looking so much, she had no idea even. It was plain wrong. I forced myself to stare at my empty plate instead. She’s an attractive woman. Sure. She knows that. We all know that in Konoha. You just noticed. That’s nothing to be announced.  I looked away from the table, to one bag that we hadn’t opened. And then I remembered something to say, though I said it unhappily. “I forgot to make dessert-” My voice resounded in a disappointed way.  “Oh I’m so glad! I brought us some flavoured mochi.”, she smiled at me. “It’s my favourite kind, strawberry. I wanted you to try some, my mom makes them.”  I stood up and started to clear her plate. “Sakura isn’t your favourite flavour?”, I smiled back at her. She made a face, “No- sakura mochi is just weird.” She began to help with the dishes. We put them in the sink one by one.  “Well- I like how sakura tastes”, I said unwittingly. Sakura started to go red standing next to me. I don’t think I go red when I’m flustered, but I started to sweat. 

Why are you such a goof. Change the fucking subject, NOW. 

My eyes moved to the unopened paper bag sitting on the couch once again. “What’s in that? Something else for the house?” She looked relieved that I had broken the tension. “The mochi is in there- oh and a little present for you.”  I looked at her perplexed. “Wasn’t all of that enough of a present-”, I laughed.  When we were done with the dishes, we sat on the couch and she brought out the home-made mochi for us. She also pulled out a bottle of sake with a pink ribbon tied around the neck. “Thought you might like this. It’s a nice flavour..”, she placed the bottle on the table.  I chewed on the sticky mochi with delight. It was yummy stuff. “It’s really nice Sakura.” Her legs poked out from the slits in her dress slightly, taking up a large chunk of my attention span. They seemed to be looming up at me. I quietly ate my mochi, trying not to look too hard. 

She adjusted herself a bit to hide them. I felt like screaming. I made her conscious about it because I was staring. What is wrong with me. I’ve seen women before. Why am I behaving like a 13 year old.  The tension between us was very palpable now. She was clearly uncomfortable, probably regretting the whole thing already. I eyed the sake and immediately said, “Why don’t we open that now- that’s a good idea.”  Sakura protested politely, “You don’t have to Sasuke-kun. It’s for you-” I grabbed the bottle and went to find glasses for us. “When am I going to drink something alone anyway..” I found glasses, and washed them a bit, before bringing them to her.  “Well okay. If you’re sure.. I’ll have some-”, she gave in a little too fast. I looked at her suspiciously. “Don’t tell me you drink like Tsunade does now..”, I teased her. She rushed to defend herself, “NO- she doesn’t drink all that much anymore. She’s treated me now and then after a hard week of work that’s all!” I laughed a little and poured for us. “You don’t have to explain all that to me- I’m not judging.”, I clinked my glass with her’s and drained it down my throat in one go. She blinked at me in surprise. “Sasuke-kun, when did you start drinking like that?” I poured some more for myself, thinking back to the days travelling in Hebi. I was so sour all the time, I found that downing a few glasses of sake would help with my mood. I’d stop with that much, cause it was just enough for me to not snap at everyone around me, but not too much that I’d let Karin snuggle up to me and not move.  I downed another glass. “Ah it’s just for the nerves.”  “Why are you nervous?”, she sipped at her glass. She was clearly holding herself back, I could tell. 

I sat very still for some time, thinking about what I could say next. As I sipped my third little glass of sake, I looked at her. “You really drink that slowly? Or are you just trying to be appropriate. Wait-am I being inappropriate? Drinking with you like this?”, the questions kept piling up in my head and I kept vomiting them out with abandon.  She smiled at me slowly. “Well Sasuke-kun, I happen to know that this sake is stronger than the kind I usually take. It’s a special variety.”  I thought back to the sake I used to drink. It was some awful cheap kind that we found in little stores on our travels. It didn’t taste half as good as this did.  “OH-OH I see..”, I exclaimed. I considered being quiet for the rest of the night, but it just didn’t seem to work, my plan.  She sipped some more and crossed one leg over the other. She looked very strong and poised at the moment, leaning back. I turned on my side to face her. My head resting on my hand, I looked at her. 

She began to speak,“Thank you for making this meal for us. You really didn’t have to.. You could’ve ordered in or even made cup ramen for us-”  ”Hey-Hey, I’d never make fucking cup ramen for you the first time you came over...”, I frowned at her, my eyes narrowing. I started to laugh. “I’d make cup ramen for that doggy guy- Kiba or someone if they suddenly came over one night-” She started smiling and biting her lip.  ”Sakura- you’re special. I’d only ever cook a proper meal for you if you came over”, I said to her face. Her eyes fixed on mine, her lips parted slightly. I felt very conscious suddenly and tried to make light of what I had said. “You know that! You’re- you’re a member of team Kakashi- we’ve gone through so much together...” My voice trailed off and my eyes struggled to find a place to rest that wasn’t her eyes or her neck. Her hair seemed to suffice for now. I looked at her hair, the little jade stone comb she had fixed in place, the etching of a flower on the stone...  ”Sasuke-kun...”  A thought occurred to me, a rather scary thought. Before I could process it, I decided to tell her because it was worth sharing. It really was a scary thought. I looked at her alarmed, “I mean, Naruto is a part of team Kakashi too but I don’t mean him. I mean he’s special and all that but that’s not what I meant-”  ”Sasuke-kun!”, Sakura raised her voice a little. My mind snapped to attention. Seeing that, she smiled widely. Then her smile faded until just a little smirk remained on her pink lips. Her eyes lowered as she said, “I’d really love that... you cooking for me, the way you did tonight-”  That look on her face was driving me crazy. I felt like I’d cook every single meal in the day for her just to have her look like that when she talks about it. I’d pack her a bento when she went to the hospital, and she’d look like that when she opens it.  I gulped slowly, the sound of my heart was filling the room. Please don’t hear this. I sipped some more of the sake, trying to calm down. I felt foolish. I was praying she brings up a topic, something we could talk about it and not just have extreme blushy reactions to.  “Where did you even learn to cook so well?”, she asked excitedly. I smiled at her and looked up at the ceiling to remember. “Ah I’ve learnt since I was 5 probably-” I looked back at her face and continued. “Itachi used to cook for us as kids. He was so good at all of this, he was a freaking genius!”, I smiled really wide, my teeth showing. I tried to hide them by pursing my lips, but my eyes glimmered with the memories of a past life. “He would make excuses to our parents, say that he used up all his pocket money- and get more to buy expensive ingredients. Then when they were out, he’d try new recipes and have me taste them.”  I put my legs up on the couch and hugged them to my chest, my eyes glazing over. “He made me the best chocolate pudding ever, every time I’d fall or scrape a knee-” Sakura moved closer to me, and put her legs up on the couch too. I looked at her, she had her chin in her hands, her hands resting on her knees. “EHH really? That’s amazing. What a great niisan-”, she said, her eyes sparkling.  She totally knew I was drunk now. But she didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t care. Sakura just listened to me with her beautiful green eyes pouring over my face, her pink hair bobbing around every time she laughed, her lips always stretching into a smile at just the right moments.  I stopped thinking about what I was saying now. I just talked and talked and talked. I felt like I was 6 years old. “Niisan used to lie to me, saying that he’d teach me the shuriken- but he never did. He just lied to me all the time-”, I said frowning slightly, taking another swig of the sake.  Sakura took the bottle from me and took a small swig too. Her speech was slurring slightly. “Awww- little Sasuke-kun must have annoyed him wanting shuriken practice all the time! You can’t blame him!”  I turned to her feeling indignant. “Well- I didn’t need him. I learnt on my own-” She laughed loudly at me and put her hands on my lap, “Gomen! Gomen! I didn’t mean it like that- awww look at your face-”  I didn’t know what she was talking about. I felt like I ought to be annoyed with her, stop this game right now.  But I couldn’t. I could not stop wanting to play this game where she laughed at me and her giggling was uncontrolled. Her hair was almost all out of her bun now, strands of pink getting in her eyes.  She kept struggling to take the hair out of her eyes, and then going back to laughing. I leaned forward a bit and carefully parted her hair, removing it from her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. 

Sakura stopped laughing. She gulped visibly, and stared at my face like a cornered animal would its hunter. “What-”, I whispered. “I’m not going to eat you-”, I whispered again. She smiled and then chuckled. “Oh- I know that-”  I was very close to her now, her smell strong and intoxicating. I went a little quiet now, trying to gather my thoughts. I felt like it had to be said. I touched her face with my fingers lightly, trailing away. “Thank you for coming tonight..”, I said slowly. I frowned slightly, the memory of bad times filling my head, “I haven’t laughed like this since my parents died...”  She looked at me carefully, seriously. She took my hand and squeezed it with both of hers. Her eyes looked sad, as she nodded slightly at me in understanding. “I want nothing more than to do this for you, any time you want..”, she said to me.  I really wanted to lean in to her lips. I really wanted to hold her face in my hands and part her lips with mine... smell her...bite her. My eyes widened a little, I took a sharp breath, trying to knock out that thought from my head. I can’t bite her- get it together man. I pulled away slightly, ashamed. She seemed to come out of her dream-like state too. She was conscious of her bare legs uncovered now from the slits in her dress. I can’t believe I had actually missed that before. Well, they had my full attention now, and it was uncomfortable to say the least. 

I cleared my throat, and looked at the time. It was half past 2 am. She followed my lead and exclaimed in alarm, “OH MY- is that really the time? It is late- we should head to bed Sasuke-kun...”  I exhaled slowly as we made awkward eye contact. “I mean- my bed- our beds- our s-separate beds-”, she sputtered. I interrupted her, her panic infecting me as well, “Yeah- of course- you’ll be fine getting home? You won’t get lost or anything? It’s dark and you’re- inebriated...”  “Yeah- I’ll be fine. And besides, you’re inebriated too, probably more than I am-” , she giggled at me again. I was starting to absolutely love that giggle. I shrugged, “You know what you’re doing. Sakura-senpai, I have a lot to learn from you-” That little quip made her blush, as expected. I smirked a little at my sly manipulative skills. 

She stood up with me and instantly toppled onto me. I lifted her up, being careful not to let my hands or my eyes linger. I felt awful for enjoying that clumsy exchange as much as I did. She had no idea...  Sakura took the comb out of her hair. Her shoulder-length pink hair, though wild and pretty was now covering up her neck. I was saddened. She made her way to the front door, turned around and beamed. “Oyasuminasai Sasuke-kun!”, she shouted. I cringed and shushed her. “Oyasuminasai Sasuke-kun!”,she repeated but in a forceful whisper now. I chuckled at her and returned the phrase, “Oyasumi.” 

She tiptoed down the stairs of the quiet building and out on to the street. I watched her walk pretty straight for most of the way, till I could not see her anymore. Then, I went inside and threw myself on my bed.  I didn’t want to think about what this night would mean tomorrow. I just knew that I still really wanted to kiss her, really hard. I smiled to myself. How had she known exactly what to say.. My head was filled with images of her laughing as I fell asleep. 

[texasianotaku]

Breakfast with Yang

Originally posted on Otome Amino

It is very very very cold in the United States right now. We knew it would be for this weekend, and so we planned accordingly when it came to staying inside and having comfort foods available. My husband went and bought some firewood before the long week ahead of us.

Some of the stuff that I think of when it comes to comfort foods is chicken and ginger congee. For those who don’t know, congee is a very versatile Asian rice porridge where different cultures and nationalities have their own spin on it. Some cultures will add a certain protein that another may omit, or some will have sweet vs. savory. At any rate, it’s widely and often consumed due to the ability to make it varied. You simply need a rice and liquid base.

Also, last week, I was able to shop at a Vietnamese market, which are fairly far away when it comes to convenience (or lack thereof). So my kitchen is full of Asian ingredients. 

And then, this week, my work schedule changed to where I no longer work Friday nights! This means more time for otome!

…And for blogging. :D

So, what does all of this have to do with otome? With all three of these factors coming together, why not make a meal fit for an otome character?

Namely, Yang from Piofiore: Fated Memories.

For those that have not played Piofiore, it is rich with descriptions of meals and food that the characters eat. One of those things is when the MC is staying with the Chinese mafia, about to partake in breakfast. Congee is a very common staple breakfast food with different ways that you can dress it so that you don’t get bored with it.

Here is your congee starter pack!

rice, ginger, onion, garlic

Obviously, we’re making a savory congee. Otherwise, if you’d like to make one that is sweet, omit the garlic and onion and maybe the ginger. Depends on the flavor profile you’re going for, but you could use it still if you’re going for something like a chai congee or even a pumpkin spice one. I haven’t tried those variations yet, but I just might have to with some coconut cream or something. BESIDES THE POINT….

For this recipe, I used a pressure cooker, but you can definitely make it on the stovetop! I’ve never made it that way before, and it takes longer, but it’s absolutely doable! Additionally, you can make congee with a rice maker alone. I won’t include those directions here because they aren’t tried and true, but they’re incredibly easy to find online.

I will also say, while you can substitute onion powder and garlic powder for the fresh onion and garlic, I do not recommend substituting ginger powder for the fresh ginger. You really cannot beat the flavor that it imparts on the whole thing. It is an absolute must when making the congee.

Here are some add-ins that I will be using for our breakfast with Yang!

As I mentioned before, this is a highly customizable meal. While I’m typically a “fresh ingredients” person, I really do think that the chicken bouillon is necessary in this recipe. It imparts an umami flavor that you didn’t know that you needed. It’s an easy ingredient to keep on hand, much more convenient than cans or cartons of more costly chicken broth or stock. However, if you’d prefer, you can definitely swap out the water and bouillon for chicken broth or stock.

Chinese doughnuts are also popular with congee or even by themselves! They are also mentioned at some point in Piofiore by their Chinese name, youtiao. You can try making them at home yourself, as there are many recipes online, but I was able to find them in the frozen foods aisle at the Asian market. It’s not one of the more common things that you can find in the frozen foods section; this past weekend was my first time ever seeing them frozen. You can also get them at Chinese and Vietnamese bakeries. When I was growing up, we used to cut them into 1-inch pieces and added them to the congee. But we also ate them on their own as well!

Also, if you will note in the screenshot of the meal earlier, the MC mentions “Chinese parsley.” Chinese parsley is also known as coriander or cilantro, so you would use that. Don’t go trying to hunt down Chinese parsley, because cilantro and coriander are the exact same thing. “A rose by any other name…” and all that.

The fried onions/shallots can be found in any Asian market and even some specialty stores, but if you can’t find it, you could definitely fry up some shallots or garlic to add as a mix-in. If I had to have only one mix-in, the shallots would be it.

My daughter loves quail eggs, so we added it to the soup. However, you could just as easily crack an egg in and mix it in or crack it on top for an easy effect. Eggs make a great addition to congee.

I also like to use rotisserie chicken to make this an even easier and quicker meal to make than to use raw chicken. I suggest saving the jelly-like goo to add to the soup as it imparts flavor as well as a silky mouthfeel to the soup. In case you did not know, that substance is gelatin. If you wanted to, you could also include the chicken carcass to extract more gelatin and chicken flavor, but I like to save them for other recipes.

I know it looks kind of gross, but it’s essential to the recipe!

However, if you are making this vegetarian, you can omit any of the chicken, bouillon, and anything else meat-related. To give it umami flavor, you can instead use soy sauce as a seasoning when everything is cooked, and you're ready to eat. However, with all of the chicken seasoning, you won't need to add soy sauce because it will be so flavorful in the end.

The next thing I made for the breakfast is Scrambled Eggs with Garlic Chives. This is not an original recipe. I got it from The Woks of Life  website. The recipe is hyperlinked, but following are pictures of the direction steps. This is one of my absolute favorite recipes. It's super easy to whip up, and it goes well with congee or simple rice with a little soy sauce. 

Garlic chives look very much like green onions, but they're much more mild in flavor and sauté very nicely. If you're going to use green onions instead, that's fine, but I would largely reduce the amount you use. It's an okay substitution, but if you're able to get the garlic chives, definitely get those. 

Here's what they look like without the packaging:

Kind of looks like grass, right? Sometimes, they'll have small blossom buds at the top that are totally edible too.

This is what it looks like to have the eggs and seasonings mixed with the small bubbles, as called for in the recipe:

The water that you include in the mix helps with this. It probably took me about 30-45 seconds of rigorous mixing to get those bubbles.

This is the halfway point of sautéing the egg and garlic chive mixture:

So you may notice here that the chives look shiny, and that's because the egg whites are clinging to them. Additionally, it looks like the chives aren't cooking. They will.

This is what your eggs should look like by the end of it:

From here, it will take maybe only one more minute to cook the chives.

I rounded out the meal with pork baos, which are steamed buns filled with a sweet Chinese barbecue pork and these big ass apples that are often sold during holidays, particularly Lunar New Year, which was February 12th this year. 

And now, for the congee recipe!

CHICKEN AND GINGER PRESSURE COOKER CONGEE

Ingredients: 1 cup jasmine rice, rinsed and drained (at least 3 times) 8 cups of water or chicken broth 1 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled 1 medium to large yellow onion, washed 4-5 cloves of garlic, minced 4 tbsp chicken bouillon (optional) fish sauce (optional, to taste) sugar (to taste) freshly ground black pepper (to taste)

Suggested add-ins cooked chicken cilantro, chopped green onions, chopped fried shallots soy sauce (if not using chicken bouillon) youtiao quail eggs poached eggs 

Directions 

1.) Put first five ingredients (and chicken bouillon, if using) in your pressure cooker. Make sure to seal the vent. Set the cooker to HIGH and on 30 minutes. In the meantime, prepare your add-ins.

2.) Once the pressure cooker timer goes off, allow for the pressure cooker to natural release. That means to leave it alone until the pressure is completely released. If you do not have the time to do a full natural release, set your timer to ten minutes, then open the vent to release the remaining steam. 

3.) Remove and discard the onion and ginger. Stir the contents of the pressure cooker. If the soup looks too thick for you, add water until it is at a consistency you'd prefer. I usually add an extra 2 - 4 cups of water because I like my congee a little thinner. There is no right or wrong consistency. Go with your preference. 

4.) Once the congee is to your preferred consistency, taste to see if you like the flavor. If it is not salty enough, add more bouillon or salt. Soy sauce is used as a finishing seasoning, not a flavoring while cooking. Add chicken and quail eggs, and let the soup heat on low to medium-low to bring the proteins to temperature, as well to heat up the soup if you added water.  

5.) Make sure that your proteins are warmed and the congee is hot before serving. Add remaining suggested add-ins to your liking. 

Be sure to round out your meal with some nice hot jasmine tea or sweetened soy milk!

Be sure to let me know if you tried the recipe!

After note: I realized that I have become everything that I hate about food blogging by this blog. So sorry for the long exposition lolol

[shirtrose7-blog]

Fat-Burning Pumpkin Pie (The Wild Diet, Low-Carb, Low-Sugar, Paleo-Friendly)

Fat-Burning Pumpkin Pie (The Wild Diet, Low-Carb, Low-Sugar, Paleo Friendly)

Total time

1 hour 25 mins

Author: Abel James

Recipe type: Dessert

Serves: 8

Ingredients

Crust

1 cup almond flour

½ cup coconut flour

¼ cup flaxseed meal

1 teaspoon sea salt

6 tablespoons organic unrefined coconut oil, melted

1 cup full-fat unsweetened canned coconut milk

2 tablespoon pure maple syrup

2 tablespoon coconut palm sugar

Filling

1 (15-ounce) can 100% pumpkin puree (or 1 ¾ cups fresh pumpkin puree)

6 Medjool dates, pits removed

⅛ teaspoon organic stevia leaf extract

2 cups evaporated goat’s milk (or full-fat unsweetened canned coconut milk - just the thick cream on top - you'll need to use 2 cans)

4 tablespoons organic unrefined coconut oil (or grass-fed butter)

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground ginger

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

¼ teaspoon sea salt

1 egg (chicken or duck)

2 egg yolks (chicken or duck)

Instructions

Crust

Preheat the oven to 425°F, and grease a pie pan with coconut oil (be sure to grease the rim, too).

In a large bowl, whisk together the coconut flour, almond flour, flaxseed meal, and salt.

Add the melted coconut oil, coconut milk, and maple syrup. Mix until well combined.

Press the dough into the greased pie pan, and freeze the pie shell while you make the filling.

Filling

In a blender, blend the pumpkin puree, dates, stevia, evaporated goat milk, coconut oil, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and salt until the dates are broken up and well-incorporated.

Add the egg and egg yolks and blend until combined. Taste (if you're ok with a bit of raw egg), and add a bit more coconut palm sugar, ginger, nutmeg, or salt, to taste.

Pour the filling into the pie shell, and line the rim of the pie pan with foil to cover the crust edges (so they don't burn). Bake for 15 minutes.

Reduce the oven temperature to 350℉. Bake until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean, about 50 minutes.

Remove from the oven and cool 2 hours. Serve immediately, or cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Notes

Superfood Crust: Add 1 tablespoon royal jelly powder, ½ teaspoon reishi mushroom powder, and ½ teaspoon ashwagandha into the dry crust ingredients.

How to make this Paleo-Friendly: You can switch out the dairy on this recipe by using the thick cream that separates when refrigerating a can of full-fat unsweetened coconut milk in place of evaporated goat’s milk.

Nut-Free Crust: To make our Buckwheat Molasses Crust, swap out the almond flour and coconut flour for 1½ cups buckwheat flour (not the same as wheat flour) and add a 1 tablespoon molasses to the crust ingredients.

3.2.2925

At the holiday dessert table, the best defense is a good offense.

You can’t make it through the holidays without an old-fashioned Pumpkin Pie.

But this time of year, Frankensweets are everywhere. Most desserts are packed of refined sugars and oils, artificial flavors, gluten, and worse – all of which contribute to a whole host of health problems and weight gain.

Sure, you could just follow the advice in checkout-aisle magazines that scream, “Give up everything delicious this time of year so you don’t get fat!”

But you know what happens when you rely on willpower, don’t you? At some point, we find ourselves scarfing up every dessert in sight.

Eating delicious food is human nature. Deprivation doesn’t work.

So, instead of fighting it, run with it. You can enjoy a big slice of pie on Thanksgiving with our super-easy, no-fail, gluten-free, fat-burning Pumpkin Pie recipe that will have everyone coming back for seconds…

In fact, we had a Tribe member say she ate our pumpkin pie for three days straight and was totally not sorry. Why? Because our pumpkin pie has real food in it (and very little added sugar).

This is one Pumpkin Pie you can feel good about devouring. #glutenfree Click To Tweet

Every time we visit our family for the holidays, we end up making at least three of these pumpkin pies. And they disappear quickly.

No regrets.

This pumpkin pie is one of our staples this time of year. If you’re looking for a Wild, paleo-friendly dessert, this pie still fits into your fat-burning plan.

At the holiday dessert table, the best defense is a good offense—so arm yourself with fat-burning pie!

Here’s a challenge: Make this pie for your Thanksgiving dinner and see if anybody even realizes it’s a “healthy pie.” I bet they tell you it’s the best Pumpkin Pie they’ve ever tasted!

You can just smile and enjoy a big ol’ slice while everyone wonders how you look so great eating like this!

If you’re planning several gatherings, or you have a big family, just go ahead and double or triple the recipe. Don’t worry, it will be eaten.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Anyone else getting hungry? I think it’s pie time. #Thanksgiving. Click To Tweet

How To Make This Pumpkin Pie A Superfood Powerhouse

Part of The Wild Diet is keeping sugar as low as possible, so we use dates to sweeten this pie instead of added processed sugars. We also love to add superfoods to our smoothies and treats to bump up the nutrient-density. Why add superfoods? Because these ingredients can make your “treat” a health powerhouse, full of: antioxidants, immune-boosters, anti-inflammatories, and even anti-aging benefits to turn back the clock.

Here’s how to make the Superfood Crust: Add 1 tablespoon royal jelly powder, ½ teaspoon reishi mushroom powder, and ½ teaspoon ashwagandha into the dry crust ingredients (in step 2 of the Crust Instructions). That’s it! No other adjustments are needed.

Make your dessert a superfood powerhouse. Click To Tweet

How to make this Paleo-Friendly: You can switch out the dairy on this recipe by using the thick cream that separates when refrigerating a can of full-fat unsweetened coconut milk in place of evaporated goat’s milk.

Want to make this pie extra rich and decadent? Go ahead and switch duck eggs for the chicken eggs. There’s no turning back

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In the holiday cookbook, you’ll find two complete meals and decadent desserts including:

Maple Brined Roasted Turkey

Goji Cranberry Sauce

Better than Mashed Potatoes

Apple Sage Stuffing

Beef Tenderloin with Bordelaise Sauce

Green Bean Casserole

Decadent Flourless Chocolate Cake

Mint Hot Chocolate

Chai Spice Eggnog

Fruit Cake Bites

Pumpkin Cheesecake

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What’s your favorite holiday pie? Comment below to let us know!

Source: http://fatburningman.com/the-perfect-fat-burning-pumpkin-pie-the-wild-diet-low-carb-paleo-friendly/

[turmericteaforweightloss-blog]

Added benefits of Turmeric for Weight Loss

Discover the extraordinary weight loss rewards of turmeric, the best way to best prepare them and just how much you should eat to get maximum advantage from turmeric - one of nature's amazing fat burning foods. Turmeric, an herb utilised to spice lots of Middle Eastern and Asian recipes, is also known as curcumin. Powdered turmeric is made by grinding the curcurmin plant, a form of parsley. The deep yellow color of curry powder is attributed to turmeric. Turmeric is actually a rhizome that is smaller sized than ginger. Its flavor is delicate and pleasing. Turmeric comes in a variety of varieties and colors - from white to deep orange. It truly is the dark, orange color of curcumin that causes soups, stews, curries, and rice dishes to have a deep, yellow colour. The flavor of turmeric is gingery, peppery, and earthy.

Saffron is far more high priced that turmeric, so turmeric is often utilised in its place. It is possible to discover powdered turmeric for sale throughout the year at your regional marketplace. You could uncover fresh turmeric rhizomes in specialty Asian markets and often in the grocery store. Fat Burning Rewards of Turmeric It's a healthier and potent spice that helps to burn fat. You can find dietary fiber, potassium, vitamin B6, iron, and manganese in turmeric. Both potassium and manganese are helpful in reducing cholesterol levels and blood stress, in addition to regulating bodily fluids. Potassium aids in blood glucose metabolism and it aids the body to produce power. Hemoglobin includes iron. Hemoglobin is quite critical for carrying oxygen throughout the body via the bloodstream. We have to have iron for the function and improvement with the brain, as well as to regulate physique temperature, metabolize muscle activity, and protect the immune system, amongst other factors. The fiber within your diet regime will make stools bulkier to acquire rid of toxins faster. Any time you consume foods which might be higher in fiber, you will really feel full with no overeating. Curcumin is definitely the key ingredient in turmeric. It is this that causes turmeric to become such a deep yellow color. That is also the ingredient that imparts health advantages. In Ayurvedia Medicine and Chinese Medicine, turmeric has been traditionally used to treat the following: menstrual difficulties, toothaches, colic, chest pains, bruises and hemorrhage, blood within the urine, jaundice, and gas. These are only a few on the circumstances it helps treat. What does turmeric contain that makes it so fantastic for health? Curcumin will be the yellow orange pigment discovered in turmeric. An overwhelming variety of studies have proven that this really is the primary anti-inflammatory agent found in this spice. As a matter of fact, the anti-inflammatory nature of curcumin, combined with curcumin's antioxidant and cancer-preventing qualities, is totally phenomenal. Curcumin contains an anti-inflammatory property that may be compared to sturdy prescription medicines and readily readily available over-the-counter drugs. And it doesn't have any in the harmful unwanted effects. Researchers have reported that curcumin may possibly be capable of enable in treating inflammatory bowel disease, ulcers, Crohn's illness, and ulcerative colitis. Curcumin consists of antioxidants that may help within the metabolism of free of charge radicals just before they are able to harm the cells from the body. The dangerous effects of no cost radicals is evident in such illnesses as arthritis. There are various affected by arthritis who report relief of symptoms after they add turmeric frequently to their foods. This relief of symptoms may include things like the having the ability to walk additional and longer without having pain, a reduction within the severity and duration of morning stiffness, and decreased swelling of your joints. According to a 2004 concern of Science, animal research indicated that curcumin could be capable of correcting the genetic defect that is definitely mainly accountable for causing cystic fibrosis, a deadly disease in the lungs that may be identified by thick mucus that triggers an extremely dangerous infection. Mucus is damaging towards the pancreas as well as interrupts the body's digestive processes plus the proper absorption of important nutrients. Curcumin's antioxidant characteristics enable the colon to ward off the harmful effects of free radicals, that are accountable for damaging the DNA composition discovered in cells; this harm can result in cancer of your colon. Curcumin can really destroy mutated cancer cells in addition to stopping them from moving throughout the physique. Curcumin also improves liver function. Frequent use of turmeric has been linked to a reduced instance from the formation of tumors, and also cancer on the colon, prostate, lung, and breast. A study accomplished at the University of Texas suggests that curcumin has the capability to slow down the development of breast cancer cells located in mice, even when the mice had currently contracted the disease. Turmeric and Quercitin (an antioxidant located in onions) are each phytonutrients which, when combined in recipes, have demonstrated an ability to lessen precancerous lesions within the intestinal tract. There was a reported reduction in both the occurrence and size of those lesions. Turmeric contains curcumin and phenethyl isothiocyanates, two phytochemicals that are plentiful in vegetables belonging to the cruciferous household (brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, turnips, kohlrabi, and kale), and these phytochemicals are very useful in limiting the development of cancerous prostate cells in human beings. They're able to even help in preventing the spread of prostate cancer that has currently come to be established inside the physique. And also much more than this, present study shows that eating foods with turmeric can decrease the chances of finding childhood leukemia. Turmeric aids your body to improve detoxification, which leads to quicker fat burning, together with supplying a basic improvement in your overall health to its life-saving anti-oxidant properties. Curcumin, that is discovered in turmeric, may possibly be helpful in stopping the oxidation of cholesterol in the physique, which helps to prevent the plaque build-up in arteries that generally results in heart attacks or strokes; it can also support in minimizing symptoms of arteriosclerosis and heart situations on account of diabetes. Turmeric is gaining support for its possible protection against Alzheimer's Illness, too. Preparing Fresh Turmeric It is actually hard to come across fresh turmeric, but it is possible to locate ground turmeric in quite a few places. It can be generally identified in the spice aisle at your grocery or super shop. Look for this item in ethnic markets and spice stores. It may be achievable to buy turmeric fresh. Naturally, it truly is preferable to get turmeric that's organically grown. Do not be swayed by the colour - the color may possibly differ mainly because there are various turmeric varieties. Fresh turmeric must be stored inside a container having a tight seal. Retailer it someplace cool and also free of charge of dampness and direct light. You'll want to retain your fresh turmeric rhizomes refrigerated. Take precautionary measures with this spice, for the reason that the dark yellow colour can readily stain your hands or clothes. The following are some suggestions for cooking with turmeric. It has an intense taste, so take care to use sparingly. Turmeric is great in pasta, seafood, tomato dishes, egg salad, or simply sprinkled over eggs. Try turmeric mixed with sour cream as a sauce for shellfish. It really is scrumptious. You may uncover that turmeric is often an ingredient in pickles and mustard. Incorporate some turmeric if you prepare dressing to pour on salads. The taste and appearance will both advantage in the bright yellow color. You may use turmeric in relishes, marinades, and savory breads. Attempt adding a bit with the spice to legumes like lentils, or to some cooked winter squash; Thai cooks use turmeric extensively in appetizers, stir-fried dishes, curries, soups, and desserts. You could spice your green tea with turmeric to enhance its cancer fighting properties. You can try turmeric with tofu recipes. You are able to sprinkle turmeric on a number of dishes to add a cheerful burst of colour and an array of healthful, fat burning added benefits. Serving Size About two teaspoons is appropriate, unless the recipe indicates otherwise. To know more details visit here: how to make turmeric tea for excess belly fat

[ouraidengray4]

The Most Surprising Places to Buy Your Favorite Health Foods for Cheap

If eating healthy was easy for everyone, there would be a mini Whole Foods on every street corner, whether you're in New York of Tennessee, and they would be selling their products for cheap ($3 coconut oils for all!). Factors like where we live, how much money we make, and access to education wouldn't determine what actually ends up on our plates. But the reality is: Most healthy foods aren't accessible (or even relevant) to everyone. Because when the closest Whole Foods is 47 miles away and you're trying to figure out how to pay your electric bill, ashwagandha powder probably won't make the grocery list.

But here's where it gets good. Healthier options are increasingly popping up in the most unexpected places... with even more unexpected prices ($3 coconut oils actually exist). We're talking everyday grocers, convenient stores, pharmacies, and retailers who are making it easy and affordable to stock up on raw organic almond butter and two-ply toilet paper in one fell swoop.

So if you didn't think "healthy" could fit into your budget, think again.

CVS Pharmacy

You may think of CVS as the place you go to get the flu shot, pick up prescriptions, and shop for last-minute birthday cards. But it’s so much more than pharmaceuticals and Hallmark products.

When CVS rebranded itself as CVS Health in 2014, we started to see more and more healthy snacks start to hit the shelves. Don’t worry—the candy aisle isn't going anywhere—but you can expect to see healthier options like Larabars, RXbars, Go Raw bars, and Whole30-approved EPIC bars and bites. There goes your "potato chips are all they had" excuse.

Don’t check out just yet! You can also find Justin’s almond butter, Chobani Greek yogurt, and even Navitas Organics cacao powder that we highly recommend you use to make this three-ingredient chocolate. And don’t forget to check out CVS’s exclusive Gold Emblem Abound brand, which carries raw nuts, trail mix, rice pop clusters, and healthy snack bars for less than what you paid for shampoo.

In other words, go for the flu shot. Stay for the almond butter.

HomeGoods

Rejoice, shopoholics—retail therapy can be good for your health (and not just mentally). Among the aisles of discounted furniture, rugs, and decor at HomeGoods, you can now find a wide variety of health products at incredible prices. In fact, this might be one of the best places to do your superfood and protein powders shopping... especially if you've been too wary of spending your life savings on crushed up plants to try it out. You can pick up OMG! spirulina and cacao powders for $5.99 and $7.99, and Raw Green Vegan protein powder for $14.99. Need to restock your chia seed supply? Buy an entire pound of Bija organic black chia seeds for just $5.99.

You can also find cooking basics like La Tourangelle avocado oil and coconut oil for less than $15, which isn't too shabby for the massive bottles they come in. And if all this shopping is making you thirsty, toss a carton of vanilla unsweetened Milkadamia into your cart or a liter of Thirsty Buddha coconut water for just $2.99. Now, HomeGoods, one day we hope we can order everything you offer online. Please.

Target

Target seems to be focusing its bull's-eye on health and wellness this year, serving up more fitness gear and health foods at a friendlier price. If you’re a Target fanatic (who isn't?), you’re probably already familiar with its Simply Balanced brand, offering organic and all-natural foods—including produce, snacks, nut butter, spices, meat, and even prepared meals. Guys, you can get a 14-ounce, organic, unrefined coconut oil for $6.99 (!!!). But what you might not know is that Simply Balanced now offers your beloved bubbly probiotic.

That’s right. We’re talkin' ‘bout the booch.

While kombucha does wonders for the gut, it isn’t usually too kind on the wallet, retailing for between $4 and $6 each. But Simply Balanced offers four quality flavors (blueberry grape, ginger, orange and raspberry, lemon and ginger) at just $2.79 a bottle. Needless to say, we’ll be celebrating by popping bottles in the insanely busy parking lot.

7-Eleven

There’s no need to blow all your money at some fancy cleanse bar when you can find cold-pressed juice at your local convenience store. That’s right—7-Eleven is bringing juicing to the people. The international chain’s newly launched line includes four produce-packed flavors that are all organic, vegan, gluten-free, and affordable, with each 14-ounce bottle for only $2.99. So unless you’re trying to cleanse your wallet in addition to your body, we recommend giving one a try the next time you’re filling up.

Costco

If you think that Whole Foods takes the (all-natural, gluten-free, non-GMO) cake for organic food sales, think again. In 2015, Costco was ranked as the largest organic grocer in the U.S.—bringing in $4 billion in organic food sales, compared to Whole Foods’ $3.6 billion. With competitive prices for organic foods (particularly produce), Costco is making big strides in including people previously priced out of eating organic.

Generally known for its weirdly culty membership, giant warehouses, and bulk sales, Costco is a little bit of a dark horse in the organics game. But with a $60 annual membership, you can access fresh, organic fruits and veggies at killer prices. Think five avocados for $7. And if paying $3 for a single piece of fruit isn’t your cup of tea? You can find organic Fuji apples for just $1.64 per pound.

If you’re not sure buying produce in bulk is right for you, check out the nonperishables (or foods you know you tend to scarf down all the time). You’ll find dried fruits and nuts, chia seeds, and a bounty of incredible frozen food, as well as organic quinoa for less than $3. Costco’s brand, Kirkland, boasts some of the most impressive prices, like a 27-ounce jar of almond butter for just $8.99.

There are hundreds of these utopic warehouses around the country, so if there’s one near you, you might want to consider ditching your organic grocer for a membership. Trust us—there’s a reason why people who go to Costco can’t stop talking about going to Costco.

from Greatist RSS http://ift.tt/2E9KMWh The Most Surprising Places to Buy Your Favorite Health Foods for Cheap Greatist RSS from HEALTH BUZZ http://ift.tt/2nK6sOj

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Gingerbread Houses: Tips & Tricks

You all loved Jenny’s kitchen and well, her whole house! when she shared a while back. She’ll be sharing her beautiful style here regularly (hooray!) and today she has some amazing inspiration, tips, tricks, and recipes for your annual gingerbread house tradition!

Gingerbread houses don’t have to be fancy (think graham crackers on empty cardboard milk cartons), but if you want them to, they can be elegant, frilly, or even gaudy. You simply can’t go wrong. They’re an expression of your creativity and your mood—an incarnation of what the season means to you.

For nearly thirty years, I’ve been making gingerbread houses at Christmas time. Small ones. Big ones. Red and green ones. Pink and blue ones. Ones covered only in frosting and ones dripping in candy canes and gum drops.

You don’t have to be an expert to make a gingerbread house! Don’t be intimidated by the elaborate gingerbread houses you see on magazine covers. Gingerbread houses—both baking and decorating them—should be fun! No keeping up with the Joneses here. Just do your thing! Here are some tips and tricks to help you on your way . . .

This post may contain affiliate links. See our full disclosure here. 

Gingerbread houses take time! Even if you’re buying a ready-made kit from your local grocery store, the icing takes hours to set up, just as it does when you’re building from scratch. If you’re baking the gingerbread, you want to give it anywhere from a full day to even 2 weeks to dry out completely before you start building with it. And once construction is under way, the icing takes several hours to dry, requiring that you work in steps over a number of days.

To make a gingerbread house from scratch, this is what you’ll need:

A sturdy base (such as heavy-duty cardboard or plywood, depending on the projected size and weight of your gingerbread house). If you plan on having landscaping surrounding your house, the base should be several inches larger than the footprint of your house.

A pattern or template for your house or church or train or whatever it is that you’re making from gingerbread. Search the Internet! There are a ton of free, as well as for-a-fee, options out there. You can also design your own. I’ve even used the pieces from a dollhouse kit as a template for a gingerbread house.

A reliable gingerbread dough recipe (I share a great one later in this post) and all the necessary ingredients.

Cookie or baking sheets that are not warped, but that lie flat so that your gingerbread does not end up misshapen as it bakes. You’ll need a rolling pin, too, and if you’ve got a stand mixer, use it!

The ingredients for the “glue” needed to assemble your house. I prefer to use royal icing (I buy Wilton Meringue Powder and add water and powdered sugar according to the recipe on the can). But some people use a hot sugar syrup, which works, too. (I’ve even heard of people who don’t plan on eating the house who use a glue gun and hot glue sticks to get the job done—nobody can see the glue under all the frosting and candy and apparently it does a great job of holding your house together).If you want to tint your icing different colors, you’ll also need food coloring.

Candy and sprinkles and edible delights of all colors, shapes, and sizes! I have made 2 or 3 gingerbread houses over the years decorated entirely with frosting, which can be beautiful, but more traditional houses incorporate candy in to the design.

Inspiration is everywhere! In store windows, in magazines, on the Internet. And I’m not talking just gingerbread houses here, but anything that attracts your eye that could be translated in to gingerbread. For example, the first time I drove by the house featured below, I just knew I had to make it into a gingerbread house. And so I did.

This red-and-white house below was inspired by some wrapping paper I saw that had a white background with red snowflakes all over it. I loved it so much that I wanted it to be a gingerbread house! It’s one of my favorite houses of all time and yet it’s not terribly traditional. Think outside the box! Make your house what you want it to be!

I’ve been making gingerbread houses long enough that I have a sixth sense for gingerbread inspiration that stays with me 365 days/year. For example, when walking down the Halloween clearance aisles at Wal-Mart, I spotted black decorating sugar for $0.40/bottle. I knew as soon as I saw it that it would add great texture and shimmer to a candy-shingle roof on a gingerbread house. I used the sugar on the Victorian-style house I built this year. (The picture below shows a section of roof covered in watered-down royal icing that I colored black with food coloring gel. The picture below that shows the shingle-like texture I achieved by sprinkling black sanding sugar all over it while the icing was still wet).

Now it’s time for my very favorite construction gingerbread recipe. It’s remarkable stuff. It works in humid climates or dry ones. If dried out properly after baking, it can withstand a significant amount of weight in icing and candy. It rolls out smoothly and bakes evenly. It smells heavenly. It’s heavy-duty and sturdy. It can be used for 2- and 3-story houses. My family and I have collectively made what may amount to hundreds of batches of the stuff over the years and it’s never failed us. Not once. Oh, and the spices make it smell incredible!

This is a picture of me and my two sisters posing in front of 2 gingerbread houses we made together with our Mom for Christmas 1993. We used the wonderful recipe you’ll find below!

My family got the recipe from Mary Comstock and her daughters Karen, Lauren, and Katie (I have featured some of Mary’s and Lauren’s beautiful gingerbread houses towards the end of this post). They in turn got it from a high school German teacher, Frau Em, who told them it is an authentic German recipe. The recipe has been in the Comstock family for over 40 years. And they make one or more gingerbread houses with it each Christmas (and sometimes for other holidays, like Halloween).

Even if you have your own gingerbread construction recipe, I recommend reading through this one, as I’ve included tips that would apply no matter what recipe you use.

And, yes, that really is the name of the recipe.

Das Pfefferkuchenhauschen or, The Never-Fail Gingerbread Recipe

(click here for a printable version of the recipe)

Each recipe makes about 1 baking sheet of dough.

Ingredients

1 cup shortening

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 cup molasses

2 tablespoons white vinegar

1-1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon cloves

5 cups pre-sifted white all-purpose flour

Cream shortening and sugar in a stand mixer. Add egg and molasses.

Add vinegar, baking soda, salt, and spices. Add flour gradually. (You may need to knead in the last cups of flour by hand.)

Pour 1/4 cup or so of vegetable oil on a large, heavy baking sheet with sides (a half-sheet pan — about 18″x 13″ by 1″ high — is perfect). Roll out dough with rolling pin until it fills the baking sheet on all sides and meets the corners. (A standard size rolling pin will fit perfectly across the width of the baking sheet.) You should keep adding vegetable oil to the top of the dough as necessary to help it roll out slick and smooth. Remove any excess dough that does not disappear beneath the rolling pin and mesh flatly into the pan. Use that dough in another pan of gingerbread.

Place your pattern pieces on top of the gingerbread and cut gingerbread house pieces in gingerbread using the tip of a knife (wipe the knife clean in between cuts, if necessary) and leave them in the pan. Cut your pieces to maximize the available space just like you would if you were using cookie cutters to cut sugar cookie dough. Pieces can share sides without space in between. You don’t need to separate the pieces out from the surrounding scraps at this time (in fact, it’s better to leave them in to keep the gingerbread from spreading). Just be sure to cut all the way through to the pan as cleanly and precisely as possible.

Bake at 350 degrees F until very well done (remember, this is for building, not for eating, and you want it dry). Depending on your oven and other factors, this can take as little as 20 minutes or as much as 35 minutes or more.

When you pull the pans out of the oven, re-trace your design cuts in the gingerbread (if you don’t, you won’t be able to separate your house pieces from the surrounding scraps when the gingerbread has dried).

Let gingerbread cool in the baking sheets until it’s no longer too hot to handle. Carefully remove the house pieces and set on cooling racks to cool completely. Ensure the pieces do not touch each other as you want the air to be able to circulate freely to dry everything out. Now is the time to pop out the ‘scraps,’ before they become hard. ‘Scraps’ are the insides of windows or the spaces between fence rails, etc. Remove the door, but don’t throw it away because you can include it later when you assemble your house — a front door can be a fun part of your house to decorate!

Leave the gingerbread out to try. (Leaving it on cooling racks is ideal so that the air can circulate on all sides.) Gingerbread used for building should “season” about 2 weeks before being used to build with so it can dry out. Dry gingerbread is stronger and will support more weight. If you’re pressed for time, or if you’re building a small house, you can get away with letting it dry overnight, just be sure to limit exposure to moisture and humidity by carefully choosing where you leave the pieces to dry.

  Once you have your dried pieces, it’s time to build!

Take a hard look at your base (heavy cardboard or plywood). Will you be adding landscaping around your house? A pretzel fence perhaps? Or maybe some sugar cone pine trees? A candy rock walkway? Calculate roughly where your house needs to be on the board in relation to what you plan to put around it.

Inspect your gingerbread pieces. Are your edges straight? If you need to do a little trimming, I prefer a bread knife and a light hand. Be very careful as you trim, though, as you don’t want the gingerbread to crack or crumble. You may want to label your pieces as you prepare to proceed so that you don’t accidentally use a roof piece as a side wall, for example. You can just write on a small piece of paper and set it on top of the pieces.

If you’re making a multi-story gingerbread house, I strongly recommend cutting pieces of heavy-duty cardboard to support the interior walls and roof(s). Just ‘glue’ it with icing inside your gingerbread house like you ‘glue’ the gingerbread together . . . run a bead of icing on all sides of the cardboard and position it in place, straight up and down, in the interior of your gingerbread house so that it comes in to direct contact with at least 2 of the inside walls and the roof.

Prepare a batch of royal icing. Cover the bowl tightly with Saran wrap or throw a damp towel over the bowl to keep the icing from drying out until you’re ready to use it. (Once you start using the icing, be sure to keep what you’re not using covered).

Grab a couple of cans of food or sturdy cups or something else that can be used as supports for your gingerbread walls.

Fit a pastry bag with a medium to large circle tip. Fill the bag with a cup or two of icing. (You don’t want to fill it too full or it will be difficult to hold and squeeze). If you don’t have a pastry or piping bag, use a heavy-duty Ziploc bag (just cut a hole in one of the corners to fit your piping tip through).

If you’re going to be doing intricate piping work or decorating on your walls, it’s much easier to do it before you assemble the house while your gingerbread pieces are flat. Keep that in mind so you can decide whether you want to decorate before or after assembly. The pictures below show decorating I did prior to assembly.

Also, if you’ll be doing a royal icing wash (like I did both on the red-and-white gingerbread house pieces above, as well as on the large black-and-white Victorian house featured at the top of this post), you’ll want to do that to the individual gingerbread pieces before you assemble them.

To make a royal icing ‘wash,’ prepare a batch of royal icing. Slowly add a little warm water at a time to thin the icing until it runs freely. You don’t want it too runny or it won’t provide sufficient coverage. When it’s ready, use a silicone pastry brush to brush it on to your walls. It takes hours and hours to dry, even longer than royal icing of regular consistency. Plan accordingly. Sometimes, after the frosting has dried, you may want to add a second coat for really thorough coverage—just be certain the first coast has dried completely before you do. Up to you.

Start with a side wall (generally longer than a front or back wall). Run a bead of icing on your base board the length of your wall. Put your gingerbread wall on top of the icing. Put a can on the outside of the wall to support it so that it remains upright and perpendicular to the base board. Run an additional bead of icing on the inside bottom of the wall for reinforcement.

Grab a front or back wall piece. These pieces will go inside of the side walls (this will make the gingerbread house stronger and more stable). Run a bead of icing on the board the length of your front or back piece. Put the piece on top of the icing. Put a can on the outside of the wall to support it so that it remains upright and perpendicular to the base board. Run an additional bead of icing on the inside bottom of the wall for reinforcement.

Add the second side wall as you did the first and finish with the final wall (either the front or back piece depending on what piece you already placed). Make sure you’ve got your supports in place and allow the icing to dry completely (overnight) before attaching the roof.

Royal icing can take forever to dry. An electric hair dryer can be used to speed up the process, but nothing works better than good old fashioned time. Usually waiting overnight will do the trick, but drying time depends on the humidity in the air, how wet your icing is, and how much icing you’ve used.

If you have leftover icing after this first stage of assembly, the icing can be put in an airtight container and refrigerated. You can leave a filled piping bag overnight as long as you cover your piping tip with a wet paper towel to keep the icing from drying out.

When the icing securing the bottom section of your house has completely dried (preferably overnight), it’s time to add the roof. I like to keep my supports in place against the side walls and have additional supports ready to go to hold my roof up while the icing dries.

Using your piping bag of royal icing, run a bead of icing around the top sides of the front, back, and side wall pieces. Put one roof piece in place on top and immediately prop it with supports (canned food works well). Place your second roof piece, aligning it carefully and immediately pipe another large bead of icing where there two roof pieces meet in the center. Prop with supports. Allow to dry overnight.

As you can see in the picture below, I used straws and canned food to rig a support system for my gingerbread pieces as they dried (I attached the gingerbread pieces using royal icing, which takes time to set up).

The sky’s the limit here. So many possibilities. Use royal icing as your glue to secure candy pieces, sprinkles, and whatever else your heart desires.

To make stained glass windows, crush hard sugar candies (like LifeSavers) and arrange them in clusters (sized a little bigger than your window openings) on a parchment- or Silpat-lined baking sheet. Bake at 250 degrees F for six to eight minutes or until they run together. Allow them to cool, remove from the baking sheet and use royal icing to attach on the back/interior side of your window openings in the gingerbread. Alternatively, melt the stained glass windows directly in your gingerbread house window openings by following the same steps as above, but instead of melting the candy by itself, put the crushed candy in the window openings in your gingerbread house walls and put everything directly in to the oven. The candy will melt to fill the openings and as it cools and solidifies, will self-attach to your gingerbread walls.

Photo credit: Lauren Comstock

Layered Necco wafer candies (as seen below) make for a great tile-like roof. You can cover them with frosting to make them all one color or add sprinkles for dimension and texture or additional candy pieces for depth. Other great roof options include crushed or whole Oreos (especially the mini size), shredded wheat or Life cereal (for the look of a thatched roof), squares of chocolate, round candies like peppermints or Lifesavers, gumdrops, sticks of gum, pretzels, M&Ms, marshmallows, and on and on.

Royal icing works great for not only for ‘gluing’ your gingerbread house together, but for making custom decorations, as well. Below, I used royal icing that I had watered down to about the consistency of Elmer’s White School Glue to make accents for the roof line of my gingerbread house. I piped the designs out on parchment paper using a small, round piping tip and let them set-up over night. Once dry, I carefully peeled back the parchment paper and peeled off the design, which I attached to my gingerbread house using more royal icing.

Don’t forget that while you’re decorating, sometimes you need a little extra help (i.e. support) to hold candy or gingerbread in place while the royal icing sets up. In the picture below, you can see that I cut a plastic drinking straw into pieces to use as supports for the awning above my window. When the icing set, I removed the straw supports.

The easiest pine trees in the world are those made out of upside down sugar cones. Cover in frosting, candy, and sprinkles. You can use different piping tips to achieve a wide variety of styles and effects.

Decorated gingerbread houses can make great gifts! Just wrap in cellophane and put a bow on it. I’ve also made homemade gingerbread kits before as gifts, too. I stack the gingerbread house pieces on a base board along with bags of candy and tie everything up together in cellophane. Kids love it!

Don’t forget the kids! When I was growing up, my mom and sisters and I would make two large gingerbread churches each Christmas. We’d work on decorating them together a little each day after school over a couple of weeks. With my own kids, I let them each have and decorate their own gingerbread house anyway they like. We have a tradition of decorating our individual gingerbread houses the day after Thanksgiving. We display them as a gingerbread village table centerpiece.

There’s even more inspiration and eye candy to come! All of the houses below are the work of the very talented Mary Comstock and her daughter, Lauren Comstock Bishop. These ladies know how to decorate a gingerbread house! A great big “thank you” to both of them for permitting me to feature their lovely work in this post!

This article was originally published on Nov 25, 2015. Updated Nov 12, 2017. 

The post Gingerbread Houses: Tips & Tricks appeared first on Remodelaholic.

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[sherlocklexa]

Gingerbread Houses: Tips & Tricks

You all loved Jenny's kitchen and well, her whole house! when she shared a while back. She'll be sharing her beautiful style here regularly (hooray!) and today she has some amazing inspiration, tips, tricks, and recipes for your annual gingerbread house tradition!

Gingerbread houses don't have to be fancy (think graham crackers on empty cardboard milk cartons), but if you want them to, they can be elegant, frilly, or even gaudy. You simply can't go wrong. They're an expression of your creativity and your mood—an incarnation of what the season means to you.

For nearly thirty years, I've been making gingerbread houses at Christmas time. Small ones. Big ones. Red and green ones. Pink and blue ones. Ones covered only in frosting and ones dripping in candy canes and gum drops.

You don't have to be an expert to make a gingerbread house! Don't be intimidated by the elaborate gingerbread houses you see on magazine covers. Gingerbread houses—both baking and decorating them—should be fun! No keeping up with the Joneses here. Just do your thing! Here are some tips and tricks to help you on your way . . .

This post may contain affiliate links. See our full disclosure here. 

Gingerbread houses take time! Even if you're buying a ready-made kit from your local grocery store, the icing takes hours to set up, just as it does when you're building from scratch. If you're baking the gingerbread, you want to give it anywhere from a full day to even 2 weeks to dry out completely before you start building with it. And once construction is under way, the icing takes several hours to dry, requiring that you work in steps over a number of days.

To make a gingerbread house from scratch, this is what you'll need:

A sturdy base (such as heavy-duty cardboard or plywood, depending on the projected size and weight of your gingerbread house). If you plan on having landscaping surrounding your house, the base should be several inches larger than the footprint of your house.

A pattern or template for your house or church or train or whatever it is that you're making from gingerbread. Search the Internet! There are a ton of free, as well as for-a-fee, options out there. You can also design your own. I've even used the pieces from a dollhouse kit as a template for a gingerbread house.

A reliable gingerbread dough recipe (I share a great one later in this post) and all the necessary ingredients.

Cookie or baking sheets that are not warped, but that lie flat so that your gingerbread does not end up misshapen as it bakes. You'll need a rolling pin, too, and if you've got a stand mixer, use it!

The ingredients for the “glue” needed to assemble your house. I prefer to use royal icing (I buy Wilton Meringue Powder and add water and powdered sugar according to the recipe on the can). But some people use a hot sugar syrup, which works, too. (I've even heard of people who don't plan on eating the house who use a glue gun and hot glue sticks to get the job done—nobody can see the glue under all the frosting and candy and apparently it does a great job of holding your house together).If you want to tint your icing different colors, you'll also need food coloring.

Candy and sprinkles and edible delights of all colors, shapes, and sizes! I have made 2 or 3 gingerbread houses over the years decorated entirely with frosting, which can be beautiful, but more traditional houses incorporate candy in to the design.

Inspiration is everywhere! In store windows, in magazines, on the Internet. And I'm not talking just gingerbread houses here, but anything that attracts your eye that could be translated in to gingerbread. For example, the first time I drove by the house featured below, I just knew I had to make it into a gingerbread house. And so I did.

This red-and-white house below was inspired by some wrapping paper I saw that had a white background with red snowflakes all over it. I loved it so much that I wanted it to be a gingerbread house! It's one of my favorite houses of all time and yet it's not terribly traditional. Think outside the box! Make your house what you want it to be!

I've been making gingerbread houses long enough that I have a sixth sense for gingerbread inspiration that stays with me 365 days/year. For example, when walking down the Halloween clearance aisles at Wal-Mart, I spotted black decorating sugar for $0.40/bottle. I knew as soon as I saw it that it would add great texture and shimmer to a candy-shingle roof on a gingerbread house. I used the sugar on the Victorian-style house I built this year. (The picture below shows a section of roof covered in watered-down royal icing that I colored black with food coloring gel. The picture below that shows the shingle-like texture I achieved by sprinkling black sanding sugar all over it while the icing was still wet).

Now it's time for my very favorite construction gingerbread recipe. It's remarkable stuff. It works in humid climates or dry ones. If dried out properly after baking, it can withstand a significant amount of weight in icing and candy. It rolls out smoothly and bakes evenly. It smells heavenly. It's heavy-duty and sturdy. It can be used for 2- and 3-story houses. My family and I have collectively made what may amount to hundreds of batches of the stuff over the years and it's never failed us. Not once. Oh, and the spices make it smell incredible!

This is a picture of me and my two sisters posing in front of 2 gingerbread houses we made together with our Mom for Christmas 1993. We used the wonderful recipe you'll find below!

My family got the recipe from Mary Comstock and her daughters Karen, Lauren, and Katie (I have featured some of Mary's and Lauren's beautiful gingerbread houses towards the end of this post). They in turn got it from a high school German teacher, Frau Em, who told them it is an authentic German recipe. The recipe has been in the Comstock family for over 40 years. And they make one or more gingerbread houses with it each Christmas (and sometimes for other holidays, like Halloween).

Even if you have your own gingerbread construction recipe, I recommend reading through this one, as I've included tips that would apply no matter what recipe you use.

And, yes, that really is the name of the recipe.

Das Pfefferkuchenhauschen or, The Never-Fail Gingerbread Recipe

(click here for a printable version of the recipe)

Each recipe makes about 1 baking sheet of dough.

Ingredients

1 cup shortening

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 cup molasses

2 tablespoons white vinegar

1-1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon cloves

5 cups pre-sifted white all-purpose flour

Cream shortening and sugar in a stand mixer. Add egg and molasses.

Add vinegar, baking soda, salt, and spices. Add flour gradually. (You may need to knead in the last cups of flour by hand.)

Pour 1/4 cup or so of vegetable oil on a large, heavy baking sheet with sides (a half-sheet pan — about 18″x 13″ by 1″ high — is perfect). Roll out dough with rolling pin until it fills the baking sheet on all sides and meets the corners. (A standard size rolling pin will fit perfectly across the width of the baking sheet.) You should keep adding vegetable oil to the top of the dough as necessary to help it roll out slick and smooth. Remove any excess dough that does not disappear beneath the rolling pin and mesh flatly into the pan. Use that dough in another pan of gingerbread.

Place your pattern pieces on top of the gingerbread and cut gingerbread house pieces in gingerbread using the tip of a knife (wipe the knife clean in between cuts, if necessary) and leave them in the pan. Cut your pieces to maximize the available space just like you would if you were using cookie cutters to cut sugar cookie dough. Pieces can share sides without space in between. You don't need to separate the pieces out from the surrounding scraps at this time (in fact, it's better to leave them in to keep the gingerbread from spreading). Just be sure to cut all the way through to the pan as cleanly and precisely as possible.

Bake at 350 degrees F until very well done (remember, this is for building, not for eating, and you want it dry). Depending on your oven and other factors, this can take as little as 20 minutes or as much as 35 minutes or more.

When you pull the pans out of the oven, re-trace your design cuts in the gingerbread (if you don't, you won't be able to separate your house pieces from the surrounding scraps when the gingerbread has dried).

Let gingerbread cool in the baking sheets until it's no longer too hot to handle. Carefully remove the house pieces and set on cooling racks to cool completely. Ensure the pieces do not touch each other as you want the air to be able to circulate freely to dry everything out. Now is the time to pop out the ‘scraps,' before they become hard. ‘Scraps' are the insides of windows or the spaces between fence rails, etc. Remove the door, but don't throw it away because you can include it later when you assemble your house — a front door can be a fun part of your house to decorate!

Leave the gingerbread out to try. (Leaving it on cooling racks is ideal so that the air can circulate on all sides.) Gingerbread used for building should “season” about 2 weeks before being used to build with so it can dry out. Dry gingerbread is stronger and will support more weight. If you're pressed for time, or if you're building a small house, you can get away with letting it dry overnight, just be sure to limit exposure to moisture and humidity by carefully choosing where you leave the pieces to dry.

  Once you have your dried pieces, it's time to build!

Take a hard look at your base (heavy cardboard or plywood). Will you be adding landscaping around your house? A pretzel fence perhaps? Or maybe some sugar cone pine trees? A candy rock walkway? Calculate roughly where your house needs to be on the board in relation to what you plan to put around it.

Inspect your gingerbread pieces. Are your edges straight? If you need to do a little trimming, I prefer a bread knife and a light hand. Be very careful as you trim, though, as you don't want the gingerbread to crack or crumble. You may want to label your pieces as you prepare to proceed so that you don't accidentally use a roof piece as a side wall, for example. You can just write on a small piece of paper and set it on top of the pieces.

If you're making a multi-story gingerbread house, I strongly recommend cutting pieces of heavy-duty cardboard to support the interior walls and roof(s). Just ‘glue' it with icing inside your gingerbread house like you ‘glue' the gingerbread together . . . run a bead of icing on all sides of the cardboard and position it in place, straight up and down, in the interior of your gingerbread house so that it comes in to direct contact with at least 2 of the inside walls and the roof.

Prepare a batch of royal icing. Cover the bowl tightly with Saran wrap or throw a damp towel over the bowl to keep the icing from drying out until you're ready to use it. (Once you start using the icing, be sure to keep what you're not using covered).

Grab a couple of cans of food or sturdy cups or something else that can be used as supports for your gingerbread walls.

Fit a pastry bag with a medium to large circle tip. Fill the bag with a cup or two of icing. (You don't want to fill it too full or it will be difficult to hold and squeeze). If you don't have a pastry or piping bag, use a heavy-duty Ziploc bag (just cut a hole in one of the corners to fit your piping tip through).

If you're going to be doing intricate piping work or decorating on your walls, it's much easier to do it before you assemble the house while your gingerbread pieces are flat. Keep that in mind so you can decide whether you want to decorate before or after assembly. The pictures below show decorating I did prior to assembly.

Also, if you'll be doing a royal icing wash (like I did both on the red-and-white gingerbread house pieces above, as well as on the large black-and-white Victorian house featured at the top of this post), you'll want to do that to the individual gingerbread pieces before you assemble them.

To make a royal icing ‘wash,' prepare a batch of royal icing. Slowly add a little warm water at a time to thin the icing until it runs freely. You don't want it too runny or it won't provide sufficient coverage. When it's ready, use a silicone pastry brush to brush it on to your walls. It takes hours and hours to dry, even longer than royal icing of regular consistency. Plan accordingly. Sometimes, after the frosting has dried, you may want to add a second coat for really thorough coverage—just be certain the first coast has dried completely before you do. Up to you.

Start with a side wall (generally longer than a front or back wall). Run a bead of icing on your base board the length of your wall. Put your gingerbread wall on top of the icing. Put a can on the outside of the wall to support it so that it remains upright and perpendicular to the base board. Run an additional bead of icing on the inside bottom of the wall for reinforcement.

Grab a front or back wall piece. These pieces will go inside of the side walls (this will make the gingerbread house stronger and more stable). Run a bead of icing on the board the length of your front or back piece. Put the piece on top of the icing. Put a can on the outside of the wall to support it so that it remains upright and perpendicular to the base board. Run an additional bead of icing on the inside bottom of the wall for reinforcement.

Add the second side wall as you did the first and finish with the final wall (either the front or back piece depending on what piece you already placed). Make sure you've got your supports in place and allow the icing to dry completely (overnight) before attaching the roof.

Royal icing can take forever to dry. An electric hair dryer can be used to speed up the process, but nothing works better than good old fashioned time. Usually waiting overnight will do the trick, but drying time depends on the humidity in the air, how wet your icing is, and how much icing you've used.

If you have leftover icing after this first stage of assembly, the icing can be put in an airtight container and refrigerated. You can leave a filled piping bag overnight as long as you cover your piping tip with a wet paper towel to keep the icing from drying out.

When the icing securing the bottom section of your house has completely dried (preferably overnight), it's time to add the roof. I like to keep my supports in place against the side walls and have additional supports ready to go to hold my roof up while the icing dries.

Using your piping bag of royal icing, run a bead of icing around the top sides of the front, back, and side wall pieces. Put one roof piece in place on top and immediately prop it with supports (canned food works well). Place your second roof piece, aligning it carefully and immediately pipe another large bead of icing where there two roof pieces meet in the center. Prop with supports. Allow to dry overnight.

As you can see in the picture below, I used straws and canned food to rig a support system for my gingerbread pieces as they dried (I attached the gingerbread pieces using royal icing, which takes time to set up).

The sky's the limit here. So many possibilities. Use royal icing as your glue to secure candy pieces, sprinkles, and whatever else your heart desires.

To make stained glass windows, crush hard sugar candies (like LifeSavers) and arrange them in clusters (sized a little bigger than your window openings) on a parchment- or Silpat-lined baking sheet. Bake at 250 degrees F for six to eight minutes or until they run together. Allow them to cool, remove from the baking sheet and use royal icing to attach on the back/interior side of your window openings in the gingerbread. Alternatively, melt the stained glass windows directly in your gingerbread house window openings by following the same steps as above, but instead of melting the candy by itself, put the crushed candy in the window openings in your gingerbread house walls and put everything directly in to the oven. The candy will melt to fill the openings and as it cools and solidifies, will self-attach to your gingerbread walls.

Photo credit: Lauren Comstock

Layered Necco wafer candies (as seen below) make for a great tile-like roof. You can cover them with frosting to make them all one color or add sprinkles for dimension and texture or additional candy pieces for depth. Other great roof options include crushed or whole Oreos (especially the mini size), shredded wheat or Life cereal (for the look of a thatched roof), squares of chocolate, round candies like peppermints or Lifesavers, gumdrops, sticks of gum, pretzels, M&Ms, marshmallows, and on and on.

Royal icing works great for not only for ‘gluing' your gingerbread house together, but for making custom decorations, as well. Below, I used royal icing that I had watered down to about the consistency of Elmer's White School Glue to make accents for the roof line of my gingerbread house. I piped the designs out on parchment paper using a small, round piping tip and let them set-up over night. Once dry, I carefully peeled back the parchment paper and peeled off the design, which I attached to my gingerbread house using more royal icing.

Don't forget that while you're decorating, sometimes you need a little extra help (i.e. support) to hold candy or gingerbread in place while the royal icing sets up. In the picture below, you can see that I cut a plastic drinking straw into pieces to use as supports for the awning above my window. When the icing set, I removed the straw supports.

The easiest pine trees in the world are those made out of upside down sugar cones. Cover in frosting, candy, and sprinkles. You can use different piping tips to achieve a wide variety of styles and effects.

Decorated gingerbread houses can make great gifts! Just wrap in cellophane and put a bow on it. I've also made homemade gingerbread kits before as gifts, too. I stack the gingerbread house pieces on a base board along with bags of candy and tie everything up together in cellophane. Kids love it!

Don't forget the kids! When I was growing up, my mom and sisters and I would make two large gingerbread churches each Christmas. We'd work on decorating them together a little each day after school over a couple of weeks. With my own kids, I let them each have and decorate their own gingerbread house anyway they like. We have a tradition of decorating our individual gingerbread houses the day after Thanksgiving. We display them as a gingerbread village table centerpiece.

There's even more inspiration and eye candy to come! All of the houses below are the work of the very talented Mary Comstock and her daughter, Lauren Comstock Bishop. These ladies know how to decorate a gingerbread house! A great big “thank you” to both of them for permitting me to feature their lovely work in this post!

This article was originally published on Nov 25, 2015. Updated Nov 12, 2017. 

The post Gingerbread Houses: Tips & Tricks appeared first on Remodelaholic.

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Gingerbread Houses: Tips & Tricks

You all loved Jenny's kitchen and well, her whole house! when she shared a while back. She'll be sharing her beautiful style here regularly (hooray!) and today she has some amazing inspiration, tips, tricks, and recipes for your annual gingerbread house tradition!

Gingerbread houses don't have to be fancy (think graham crackers on empty cardboard milk cartons), but if you want them to, they can be elegant, frilly, or even gaudy. You simply can't go wrong. They're an expression of your creativity and your mood—an incarnation of what the season means to you.

For nearly thirty years, I've been making gingerbread houses at Christmas time. Small ones. Big ones. Red and green ones. Pink and blue ones. Ones covered only in frosting and ones dripping in candy canes and gum drops.

You don't have to be an expert to make a gingerbread house! Don't be intimidated by the elaborate gingerbread houses you see on magazine covers. Gingerbread houses—both baking and decorating them—should be fun! No keeping up with the Joneses here. Just do your thing! Here are some tips and tricks to help you on your way . . .

This post may contain affiliate links. See our full disclosure here. 

Gingerbread houses take time! Even if you're buying a ready-made kit from your local grocery store, the icing takes hours to set up, just as it does when you're building from scratch. If you're baking the gingerbread, you want to give it anywhere from a full day to even 2 weeks to dry out completely before you start building with it. And once construction is under way, the icing takes several hours to dry, requiring that you work in steps over a number of days.

To make a gingerbread house from scratch, this is what you'll need:

A sturdy base (such as heavy-duty cardboard or plywood, depending on the projected size and weight of your gingerbread house). If you plan on having landscaping surrounding your house, the base should be several inches larger than the footprint of your house.

A pattern or template for your house or church or train or whatever it is that you're making from gingerbread. Search the Internet! There are a ton of free, as well as for-a-fee, options out there. You can also design your own. I've even used the pieces from a dollhouse kit as a template for a gingerbread house.

A reliable gingerbread dough recipe (I share a great one later in this post) and all the necessary ingredients.

Cookie or baking sheets that are not warped, but that lie flat so that your gingerbread does not end up misshapen as it bakes. You'll need a rolling pin, too, and if you've got a stand mixer, use it!

The ingredients for the “glue” needed to assemble your house. I prefer to use royal icing (I buy Wilton Meringue Powder and add water and powdered sugar according to the recipe on the can). But some people use a hot sugar syrup, which works, too. (I've even heard of people who don't plan on eating the house who use a glue gun and hot glue sticks to get the job done—nobody can see the glue under all the frosting and candy and apparently it does a great job of holding your house together).If you want to tint your icing different colors, you'll also need food coloring.

Candy and sprinkles and edible delights of all colors, shapes, and sizes! I have made 2 or 3 gingerbread houses over the years decorated entirely with frosting, which can be beautiful, but more traditional houses incorporate candy in to the design.

Inspiration is everywhere! In store windows, in magazines, on the Internet. And I'm not talking just gingerbread houses here, but anything that attracts your eye that could be translated in to gingerbread. For example, the first time I drove by the house featured below, I just knew I had to make it into a gingerbread house. And so I did.

This red-and-white house below was inspired by some wrapping paper I saw that had a white background with red snowflakes all over it. I loved it so much that I wanted it to be a gingerbread house! It's one of my favorite houses of all time and yet it's not terribly traditional. Think outside the box! Make your house what you want it to be!

I've been making gingerbread houses long enough that I have a sixth sense for gingerbread inspiration that stays with me 365 days/year. For example, when walking down the Halloween clearance aisles at Wal-Mart, I spotted black decorating sugar for $0.40/bottle. I knew as soon as I saw it that it would add great texture and shimmer to a candy-shingle roof on a gingerbread house. I used the sugar on the Victorian-style house I built this year. (The picture below shows a section of roof covered in watered-down royal icing that I colored black with food coloring gel. The picture below that shows the shingle-like texture I achieved by sprinkling black sanding sugar all over it while the icing was still wet).

Now it's time for my very favorite construction gingerbread recipe. It's remarkable stuff. It works in humid climates or dry ones. If dried out properly after baking, it can withstand a significant amount of weight in icing and candy. It rolls out smoothly and bakes evenly. It smells heavenly. It's heavy-duty and sturdy. It can be used for 2- and 3-story houses. My family and I have collectively made what may amount to hundreds of batches of the stuff over the years and it's never failed us. Not once. Oh, and the spices make it smell incredible!

This is a picture of me and my two sisters posing in front of 2 gingerbread houses we made together with our Mom for Christmas 1993. We used the wonderful recipe you'll find below!

My family got the recipe from Mary Comstock and her daughters Karen, Lauren, and Katie (I have featured some of Mary's and Lauren's beautiful gingerbread houses towards the end of this post). They in turn got it from a high school German teacher, Frau Em, who told them it is an authentic German recipe. The recipe has been in the Comstock family for over 40 years. And they make one or more gingerbread houses with it each Christmas (and sometimes for other holidays, like Halloween).

Even if you have your own gingerbread construction recipe, I recommend reading through this one, as I've included tips that would apply no matter what recipe you use.

And, yes, that really is the name of the recipe.

Das Pfefferkuchenhauschen or, The Never-Fail Gingerbread Recipe

(click here for a printable version of the recipe)

Each recipe makes about 1 baking sheet of dough.

Ingredients

1 cup shortening

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 cup molasses

2 tablespoons white vinegar

1-1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon cloves

5 cups pre-sifted white all-purpose flour

Cream shortening and sugar in a stand mixer. Add egg and molasses.

Add vinegar, baking soda, salt, and spices. Add flour gradually. (You may need to knead in the last cups of flour by hand.)

Pour 1/4 cup or so of vegetable oil on a large, heavy baking sheet with sides (a half-sheet pan — about 18″x 13″ by 1″ high — is perfect). Roll out dough with rolling pin until it fills the baking sheet on all sides and meets the corners. (A standard size rolling pin will fit perfectly across the width of the baking sheet.) You should keep adding vegetable oil to the top of the dough as necessary to help it roll out slick and smooth. Remove any excess dough that does not disappear beneath the rolling pin and mesh flatly into the pan. Use that dough in another pan of gingerbread.

Place your pattern pieces on top of the gingerbread and cut gingerbread house pieces in gingerbread using the tip of a knife (wipe the knife clean in between cuts, if necessary) and leave them in the pan. Cut your pieces to maximize the available space just like you would if you were using cookie cutters to cut sugar cookie dough. Pieces can share sides without space in between. You don't need to separate the pieces out from the surrounding scraps at this time (in fact, it's better to leave them in to keep the gingerbread from spreading). Just be sure to cut all the way through to the pan as cleanly and precisely as possible.

Bake at 350 degrees F until very well done (remember, this is for building, not for eating, and you want it dry). Depending on your oven and other factors, this can take as little as 20 minutes or as much as 35 minutes or more.

When you pull the pans out of the oven, re-trace your design cuts in the gingerbread (if you don't, you won't be able to separate your house pieces from the surrounding scraps when the gingerbread has dried).

Let gingerbread cool in the baking sheets until it's no longer too hot to handle. Carefully remove the house pieces and set on cooling racks to cool completely. Ensure the pieces do not touch each other as you want the air to be able to circulate freely to dry everything out. Now is the time to pop out the ‘scraps,' before they become hard. ‘Scraps' are the insides of windows or the spaces between fence rails, etc. Remove the door, but don't throw it away because you can include it later when you assemble your house — a front door can be a fun part of your house to decorate!

Leave the gingerbread out to try. (Leaving it on cooling racks is ideal so that the air can circulate on all sides.) Gingerbread used for building should “season” about 2 weeks before being used to build with so it can dry out. Dry gingerbread is stronger and will support more weight. If you're pressed for time, or if you're building a small house, you can get away with letting it dry overnight, just be sure to limit exposure to moisture and humidity by carefully choosing where you leave the pieces to dry.

  Once you have your dried pieces, it's time to build!

Take a hard look at your base (heavy cardboard or plywood). Will you be adding landscaping around your house? A pretzel fence perhaps? Or maybe some sugar cone pine trees? A candy rock walkway? Calculate roughly where your house needs to be on the board in relation to what you plan to put around it.

Inspect your gingerbread pieces. Are your edges straight? If you need to do a little trimming, I prefer a bread knife and a light hand. Be very careful as you trim, though, as you don't want the gingerbread to crack or crumble. You may want to label your pieces as you prepare to proceed so that you don't accidentally use a roof piece as a side wall, for example. You can just write on a small piece of paper and set it on top of the pieces.

If you're making a multi-story gingerbread house, I strongly recommend cutting pieces of heavy-duty cardboard to support the interior walls and roof(s). Just ‘glue' it with icing inside your gingerbread house like you ‘glue' the gingerbread together . . . run a bead of icing on all sides of the cardboard and position it in place, straight up and down, in the interior of your gingerbread house so that it comes in to direct contact with at least 2 of the inside walls and the roof.

Prepare a batch of royal icing. Cover the bowl tightly with Saran wrap or throw a damp towel over the bowl to keep the icing from drying out until you're ready to use it. (Once you start using the icing, be sure to keep what you're not using covered).

Grab a couple of cans of food or sturdy cups or something else that can be used as supports for your gingerbread walls.

Fit a pastry bag with a medium to large circle tip. Fill the bag with a cup or two of icing. (You don't want to fill it too full or it will be difficult to hold and squeeze). If you don't have a pastry or piping bag, use a heavy-duty Ziploc bag (just cut a hole in one of the corners to fit your piping tip through).

If you're going to be doing intricate piping work or decorating on your walls, it's much easier to do it before you assemble the house while your gingerbread pieces are flat. Keep that in mind so you can decide whether you want to decorate before or after assembly. The pictures below show decorating I did prior to assembly.

Also, if you'll be doing a royal icing wash (like I did both on the red-and-white gingerbread house pieces above, as well as on the large black-and-white Victorian house featured at the top of this post), you'll want to do that to the individual gingerbread pieces before you assemble them.

To make a royal icing ‘wash,' prepare a batch of royal icing. Slowly add a little warm water at a time to thin the icing until it runs freely. You don't want it too runny or it won't provide sufficient coverage. When it's ready, use a silicone pastry brush to brush it on to your walls. It takes hours and hours to dry, even longer than royal icing of regular consistency. Plan accordingly. Sometimes, after the frosting has dried, you may want to add a second coat for really thorough coverage—just be certain the first coast has dried completely before you do. Up to you.

Start with a side wall (generally longer than a front or back wall). Run a bead of icing on your base board the length of your wall. Put your gingerbread wall on top of the icing. Put a can on the outside of the wall to support it so that it remains upright and perpendicular to the base board. Run an additional bead of icing on the inside bottom of the wall for reinforcement.

Grab a front or back wall piece. These pieces will go inside of the side walls (this will make the gingerbread house stronger and more stable). Run a bead of icing on the board the length of your front or back piece. Put the piece on top of the icing. Put a can on the outside of the wall to support it so that it remains upright and perpendicular to the base board. Run an additional bead of icing on the inside bottom of the wall for reinforcement.

Add the second side wall as you did the first and finish with the final wall (either the front or back piece depending on what piece you already placed). Make sure you've got your supports in place and allow the icing to dry completely (overnight) before attaching the roof.

Royal icing can take forever to dry. An electric hair dryer can be used to speed up the process, but nothing works better than good old fashioned time. Usually waiting overnight will do the trick, but drying time depends on the humidity in the air, how wet your icing is, and how much icing you've used.

If you have leftover icing after this first stage of assembly, the icing can be put in an airtight container and refrigerated. You can leave a filled piping bag overnight as long as you cover your piping tip with a wet paper towel to keep the icing from drying out.

When the icing securing the bottom section of your house has completely dried (preferably overnight), it's time to add the roof. I like to keep my supports in place against the side walls and have additional supports ready to go to hold my roof up while the icing dries.

Using your piping bag of royal icing, run a bead of icing around the top sides of the front, back, and side wall pieces. Put one roof piece in place on top and immediately prop it with supports (canned food works well). Place your second roof piece, aligning it carefully and immediately pipe another large bead of icing where there two roof pieces meet in the center. Prop with supports. Allow to dry overnight.

As you can see in the picture below, I used straws and canned food to rig a support system for my gingerbread pieces as they dried (I attached the gingerbread pieces using royal icing, which takes time to set up).

The sky's the limit here. So many possibilities. Use royal icing as your glue to secure candy pieces, sprinkles, and whatever else your heart desires.

To make stained glass windows, crush hard sugar candies (like LifeSavers) and arrange them in clusters (sized a little bigger than your window openings) on a parchment- or Silpat-lined baking sheet. Bake at 250 degrees F for six to eight minutes or until they run together. Allow them to cool, remove from the baking sheet and use royal icing to attach on the back/interior side of your window openings in the gingerbread. Alternatively, melt the stained glass windows directly in your gingerbread house window openings by following the same steps as above, but instead of melting the candy by itself, put the crushed candy in the window openings in your gingerbread house walls and put everything directly in to the oven. The candy will melt to fill the openings and as it cools and solidifies, will self-attach to your gingerbread walls.

Photo credit: Lauren Comstock

Layered Necco wafer candies (as seen below) make for a great tile-like roof. You can cover them with frosting to make them all one color or add sprinkles for dimension and texture or additional candy pieces for depth. Other great roof options include crushed or whole Oreos (especially the mini size), shredded wheat or Life cereal (for the look of a thatched roof), squares of chocolate, round candies like peppermints or Lifesavers, gumdrops, sticks of gum, pretzels, M&Ms, marshmallows, and on and on.

Royal icing works great for not only for ‘gluing' your gingerbread house together, but for making custom decorations, as well. Below, I used royal icing that I had watered down to about the consistency of Elmer's White School Glue to make accents for the roof line of my gingerbread house. I piped the designs out on parchment paper using a small, round piping tip and let them set-up over night. Once dry, I carefully peeled back the parchment paper and peeled off the design, which I attached to my gingerbread house using more royal icing.

Don't forget that while you're decorating, sometimes you need a little extra help (i.e. support) to hold candy or gingerbread in place while the royal icing sets up. In the picture below, you can see that I cut a plastic drinking straw into pieces to use as supports for the awning above my window. When the icing set, I removed the straw supports.

The easiest pine trees in the world are those made out of upside down sugar cones. Cover in frosting, candy, and sprinkles. You can use different piping tips to achieve a wide variety of styles and effects.

Decorated gingerbread houses can make great gifts! Just wrap in cellophane and put a bow on it. I've also made homemade gingerbread kits before as gifts, too. I stack the gingerbread house pieces on a base board along with bags of candy and tie everything up together in cellophane. Kids love it!

Don't forget the kids! When I was growing up, my mom and sisters and I would make two large gingerbread churches each Christmas. We'd work on decorating them together a little each day after school over a couple of weeks. With my own kids, I let them each have and decorate their own gingerbread house anyway they like. We have a tradition of decorating our individual gingerbread houses the day after Thanksgiving. We display them as a gingerbread village table centerpiece.

There's even more inspiration and eye candy to come! All of the houses below are the work of the very talented Mary Comstock and her daughter, Lauren Comstock Bishop. These ladies know how to decorate a gingerbread house! A great big “thank you” to both of them for permitting me to feature their lovely work in this post!

This article was originally published on Nov 25, 2015. Updated Nov 12, 2017. 

The post Gingerbread Houses: Tips & Tricks appeared first on Remodelaholic.

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Gingerbread Houses: Tips & Tricks

You all loved Jenny's kitchen and well, her whole house! when she shared a while back. She'll be sharing her beautiful style here regularly (hooray!) and today she has some amazing inspiration, tips, tricks, and recipes for your annual gingerbread house tradition!

Gingerbread houses don't have to be fancy (think graham crackers on empty cardboard milk cartons), but if you want them to, they can be elegant, frilly, or even gaudy. You simply can't go wrong. They're an expression of your creativity and your mood—an incarnation of what the season means to you.

For nearly thirty years, I've been making gingerbread houses at Christmas time. Small ones. Big ones. Red and green ones. Pink and blue ones. Ones covered only in frosting and ones dripping in candy canes and gum drops.

You don't have to be an expert to make a gingerbread house! Don't be intimidated by the elaborate gingerbread houses you see on magazine covers. Gingerbread houses—both baking and decorating them—should be fun! No keeping up with the Joneses here. Just do your thing! Here are some tips and tricks to help you on your way . . .

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Gingerbread houses take time! Even if you're buying a ready-made kit from your local grocery store, the icing takes hours to set up, just as it does when you're building from scratch. If you're baking the gingerbread, you want to give it anywhere from a full day to even 2 weeks to dry out completely before you start building with it. And once construction is under way, the icing takes several hours to dry, requiring that you work in steps over a number of days.

To make a gingerbread house from scratch, this is what you'll need:

A sturdy base (such as heavy-duty cardboard or plywood, depending on the projected size and weight of your gingerbread house). If you plan on having landscaping surrounding your house, the base should be several inches larger than the footprint of your house.

A pattern or template for your house or church or train or whatever it is that you're making from gingerbread. Search the Internet! There are a ton of free, as well as for-a-fee, options out there. You can also design your own. I've even used the pieces from a dollhouse kit as a template for a gingerbread house.

A reliable gingerbread dough recipe (I share a great one later in this post) and all the necessary ingredients.

Cookie or baking sheets that are not warped, but that lie flat so that your gingerbread does not end up misshapen as it bakes. You'll need a rolling pin, too, and if you've got a stand mixer, use it!

The ingredients for the “glue” needed to assemble your house. I prefer to use royal icing (I buy Wilton Meringue Powder and add water and powdered sugar according to the recipe on the can). But some people use a hot sugar syrup, which works, too. (I've even heard of people who don't plan on eating the house who use a glue gun and hot glue sticks to get the job done—nobody can see the glue under all the frosting and candy and apparently it does a great job of holding your house together).If you want to tint your icing different colors, you'll also need food coloring.

Candy and sprinkles and edible delights of all colors, shapes, and sizes! I have made 2 or 3 gingerbread houses over the years decorated entirely with frosting, which can be beautiful, but more traditional houses incorporate candy in to the design.

Inspiration is everywhere! In store windows, in magazines, on the Internet. And I'm not talking just gingerbread houses here, but anything that attracts your eye that could be translated in to gingerbread. For example, the first time I drove by the house featured below, I just knew I had to make it into a gingerbread house. And so I did.

This red-and-white house below was inspired by some wrapping paper I saw that had a white background with red snowflakes all over it. I loved it so much that I wanted it to be a gingerbread house! It's one of my favorite houses of all time and yet it's not terribly traditional. Think outside the box! Make your house what you want it to be!

I've been making gingerbread houses long enough that I have a sixth sense for gingerbread inspiration that stays with me 365 days/year. For example, when walking down the Halloween clearance aisles at Wal-Mart, I spotted black decorating sugar for $0.40/bottle. I knew as soon as I saw it that it would add great texture and shimmer to a candy-shingle roof on a gingerbread house. I used the sugar on the Victorian-style house I built this year. (The picture below shows a section of roof covered in watered-down royal icing that I colored black with food coloring gel. The picture below that shows the shingle-like texture I achieved by sprinkling black sanding sugar all over it while the icing was still wet).

Now it's time for my very favorite construction gingerbread recipe. It's remarkable stuff. It works in humid climates or dry ones. If dried out properly after baking, it can withstand a significant amount of weight in icing and candy. It rolls out smoothly and bakes evenly. It smells heavenly. It's heavy-duty and sturdy. It can be used for 2- and 3-story houses. My family and I have collectively made what may amount to hundreds of batches of the stuff over the years and it's never failed us. Not once. Oh, and the spices make it smell incredible!

This is a picture of me and my two sisters posing in front of 2 gingerbread houses we made together with our Mom for Christmas 1993. We used the wonderful recipe you'll find below!

My family got the recipe from Mary Comstock and her daughters Karen, Lauren, and Katie (I have featured some of Mary's and Lauren's beautiful gingerbread houses towards the end of this post). They in turn got it from a high school German teacher, Frau Em, who told them it is an authentic German recipe. The recipe has been in the Comstock family for over 40 years. And they make one or more gingerbread houses with it each Christmas (and sometimes for other holidays, like Halloween).

Even if you have your own gingerbread construction recipe, I recommend reading through this one, as I've included tips that would apply no matter what recipe you use.

And, yes, that really is the name of the recipe.

Das Pfefferkuchenhauschen or, The Never-Fail Gingerbread Recipe

(click here for a printable version of the recipe)

Each recipe makes about 1 baking sheet of dough.

Ingredients

1 cup shortening

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 cup molasses

2 tablespoons white vinegar

1-1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon cloves

5 cups pre-sifted white all-purpose flour

Cream shortening and sugar in a stand mixer. Add egg and molasses.

Add vinegar, baking soda, salt, and spices. Add flour gradually. (You may need to knead in the last cups of flour by hand.)

Pour 1/4 cup or so of vegetable oil on a large, heavy baking sheet with sides (a half-sheet pan — about 18″x 13″ by 1″ high — is perfect). Roll out dough with rolling pin until it fills the baking sheet on all sides and meets the corners. (A standard size rolling pin will fit perfectly across the width of the baking sheet.) You should keep adding vegetable oil to the top of the dough as necessary to help it roll out slick and smooth. Remove any excess dough that does not disappear beneath the rolling pin and mesh flatly into the pan. Use that dough in another pan of gingerbread.

Place your pattern pieces on top of the gingerbread and cut gingerbread house pieces in gingerbread using the tip of a knife (wipe the knife clean in between cuts, if necessary) and leave them in the pan. Cut your pieces to maximize the available space just like you would if you were using cookie cutters to cut sugar cookie dough. Pieces can share sides without space in between. You don't need to separate the pieces out from the surrounding scraps at this time (in fact, it's better to leave them in to keep the gingerbread from spreading). Just be sure to cut all the way through to the pan as cleanly and precisely as possible.

Bake at 350 degrees F until very well done (remember, this is for building, not for eating, and you want it dry). Depending on your oven and other factors, this can take as little as 20 minutes or as much as 35 minutes or more.

When you pull the pans out of the oven, re-trace your design cuts in the gingerbread (if you don't, you won't be able to separate your house pieces from the surrounding scraps when the gingerbread has dried).

Let gingerbread cool in the baking sheets until it's no longer too hot to handle. Carefully remove the house pieces and set on cooling racks to cool completely. Ensure the pieces do not touch each other as you want the air to be able to circulate freely to dry everything out. Now is the time to pop out the ‘scraps,' before they become hard. ‘Scraps' are the insides of windows or the spaces between fence rails, etc. Remove the door, but don't throw it away because you can include it later when you assemble your house — a front door can be a fun part of your house to decorate!

Leave the gingerbread out to try. (Leaving it on cooling racks is ideal so that the air can circulate on all sides.) Gingerbread used for building should “season” about 2 weeks before being used to build with so it can dry out. Dry gingerbread is stronger and will support more weight. If you're pressed for time, or if you're building a small house, you can get away with letting it dry overnight, just be sure to limit exposure to moisture and humidity by carefully choosing where you leave the pieces to dry.

  Once you have your dried pieces, it's time to build!

Take a hard look at your base (heavy cardboard or plywood). Will you be adding landscaping around your house? A pretzel fence perhaps? Or maybe some sugar cone pine trees? A candy rock walkway? Calculate roughly where your house needs to be on the board in relation to what you plan to put around it.

Inspect your gingerbread pieces. Are your edges straight? If you need to do a little trimming, I prefer a bread knife and a light hand. Be very careful as you trim, though, as you don't want the gingerbread to crack or crumble. You may want to label your pieces as you prepare to proceed so that you don't accidentally use a roof piece as a side wall, for example. You can just write on a small piece of paper and set it on top of the pieces.

If you're making a multi-story gingerbread house, I strongly recommend cutting pieces of heavy-duty cardboard to support the interior walls and roof(s). Just ‘glue' it with icing inside your gingerbread house like you ‘glue' the gingerbread together . . . run a bead of icing on all sides of the cardboard and position it in place, straight up and down, in the interior of your gingerbread house so that it comes in to direct contact with at least 2 of the inside walls and the roof.

Prepare a batch of royal icing. Cover the bowl tightly with Saran wrap or throw a damp towel over the bowl to keep the icing from drying out until you're ready to use it. (Once you start using the icing, be sure to keep what you're not using covered).

Grab a couple of cans of food or sturdy cups or something else that can be used as supports for your gingerbread walls.

Fit a pastry bag with a medium to large circle tip. Fill the bag with a cup or two of icing. (You don't want to fill it too full or it will be difficult to hold and squeeze). If you don't have a pastry or piping bag, use a heavy-duty Ziploc bag (just cut a hole in one of the corners to fit your piping tip through).

If you're going to be doing intricate piping work or decorating on your walls, it's much easier to do it before you assemble the house while your gingerbread pieces are flat. Keep that in mind so you can decide whether you want to decorate before or after assembly. The pictures below show decorating I did prior to assembly.

Also, if you'll be doing a royal icing wash (like I did both on the red-and-white gingerbread house pieces above, as well as on the large black-and-white Victorian house featured at the top of this post), you'll want to do that to the individual gingerbread pieces before you assemble them.

To make a royal icing ‘wash,' prepare a batch of royal icing. Slowly add a little warm water at a time to thin the icing until it runs freely. You don't want it too runny or it won't provide sufficient coverage. When it's ready, use a silicone pastry brush to brush it on to your walls. It takes hours and hours to dry, even longer than royal icing of regular consistency. Plan accordingly. Sometimes, after the frosting has dried, you may want to add a second coat for really thorough coverage—just be certain the first coast has dried completely before you do. Up to you.

Start with a side wall (generally longer than a front or back wall). Run a bead of icing on your base board the length of your wall. Put your gingerbread wall on top of the icing. Put a can on the outside of the wall to support it so that it remains upright and perpendicular to the base board. Run an additional bead of icing on the inside bottom of the wall for reinforcement.

Grab a front or back wall piece. These pieces will go inside of the side walls (this will make the gingerbread house stronger and more stable). Run a bead of icing on the board the length of your front or back piece. Put the piece on top of the icing. Put a can on the outside of the wall to support it so that it remains upright and perpendicular to the base board. Run an additional bead of icing on the inside bottom of the wall for reinforcement.

Add the second side wall as you did the first and finish with the final wall (either the front or back piece depending on what piece you already placed). Make sure you've got your supports in place and allow the icing to dry completely (overnight) before attaching the roof.

Royal icing can take forever to dry. An electric hair dryer can be used to speed up the process, but nothing works better than good old fashioned time. Usually waiting overnight will do the trick, but drying time depends on the humidity in the air, how wet your icing is, and how much icing you've used.

If you have leftover icing after this first stage of assembly, the icing can be put in an airtight container and refrigerated. You can leave a filled piping bag overnight as long as you cover your piping tip with a wet paper towel to keep the icing from drying out.

When the icing securing the bottom section of your house has completely dried (preferably overnight), it's time to add the roof. I like to keep my supports in place against the side walls and have additional supports ready to go to hold my roof up while the icing dries.

Using your piping bag of royal icing, run a bead of icing around the top sides of the front, back, and side wall pieces. Put one roof piece in place on top and immediately prop it with supports (canned food works well). Place your second roof piece, aligning it carefully and immediately pipe another large bead of icing where there two roof pieces meet in the center. Prop with supports. Allow to dry overnight.

As you can see in the picture below, I used straws and canned food to rig a support system for my gingerbread pieces as they dried (I attached the gingerbread pieces using royal icing, which takes time to set up).

The sky's the limit here. So many possibilities. Use royal icing as your glue to secure candy pieces, sprinkles, and whatever else your heart desires.

To make stained glass windows, crush hard sugar candies (like LifeSavers) and arrange them in clusters (sized a little bigger than your window openings) on a parchment- or Silpat-lined baking sheet. Bake at 250 degrees F for six to eight minutes or until they run together. Allow them to cool, remove from the baking sheet and use royal icing to attach on the back/interior side of your window openings in the gingerbread. Alternatively, melt the stained glass windows directly in your gingerbread house window openings by following the same steps as above, but instead of melting the candy by itself, put the crushed candy in the window openings in your gingerbread house walls and put everything directly in to the oven. The candy will melt to fill the openings and as it cools and solidifies, will self-attach to your gingerbread walls.

Photo credit: Lauren Comstock

Layered Necco wafer candies (as seen below) make for a great tile-like roof. You can cover them with frosting to make them all one color or add sprinkles for dimension and texture or additional candy pieces for depth. Other great roof options include crushed or whole Oreos (especially the mini size), shredded wheat or Life cereal (for the look of a thatched roof), squares of chocolate, round candies like peppermints or Lifesavers, gumdrops, sticks of gum, pretzels, M&Ms, marshmallows, and on and on.

Royal icing works great for not only for ‘gluing' your gingerbread house together, but for making custom decorations, as well. Below, I used royal icing that I had watered down to about the consistency of Elmer's White School Glue to make accents for the roof line of my gingerbread house. I piped the designs out on parchment paper using a small, round piping tip and let them set-up over night. Once dry, I carefully peeled back the parchment paper and peeled off the design, which I attached to my gingerbread house using more royal icing.

Don't forget that while you're decorating, sometimes you need a little extra help (i.e. support) to hold candy or gingerbread in place while the royal icing sets up. In the picture below, you can see that I cut a plastic drinking straw into pieces to use as supports for the awning above my window. When the icing set, I removed the straw supports.

The easiest pine trees in the world are those made out of upside down sugar cones. Cover in frosting, candy, and sprinkles. You can use different piping tips to achieve a wide variety of styles and effects.

Decorated gingerbread houses can make great gifts! Just wrap in cellophane and put a bow on it. I've also made homemade gingerbread kits before as gifts, too. I stack the gingerbread house pieces on a base board along with bags of candy and tie everything up together in cellophane. Kids love it!

Don't forget the kids! When I was growing up, my mom and sisters and I would make two large gingerbread churches each Christmas. We'd work on decorating them together a little each day after school over a couple of weeks. With my own kids, I let them each have and decorate their own gingerbread house anyway they like. We have a tradition of decorating our individual gingerbread houses the day after Thanksgiving. We display them as a gingerbread village table centerpiece.

There's even more inspiration and eye candy to come! All of the houses below are the work of the very talented Mary Comstock and her daughter, Lauren Comstock Bishop. These ladies know how to decorate a gingerbread house! A great big “thank you” to both of them for permitting me to feature their lovely work in this post!

This article was originally published on Nov 25, 2015. Updated Nov 12, 2017. 

The post Gingerbread Houses: Tips & Tricks appeared first on Remodelaholic.

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