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For the holiday season Build a beautiful gingerbread housel“ by Joanne Newman Rural Organization Specialist Christmas is a magical time filled with Color. warmth and happiness. Your Christmas buffet table can be a fairy tale this year with your own gingerbread house. Have fun and let your fantasies become reality as you create with gingerbread dough, icing and multi-colored candies. My husband and I tried our hands at making a gingerbread house last Christmas. After three evenings of hard work we had proudly created our own fairyland house complete with landscaping! Our family admired this showpiece until Christmas Day. But the thought of dismantling our gingerbread house made us sad. Because we wished someone else could go on enjoying it, we decided to donate it as a Christmas gift to the local Senior Citizen's Home. The old folks were overjoyed by this colorful gift on Christmas day! They managed to eat every single morsel! This year make a gingerbread house. cottage, church, castle or even a barn. Have fun creating your visions of what Hansel and Gretel found in the forestl Enjoy it with your family or donate it to a needy group such as senior citizens or a children's hospital. lnexperienced cooks will be wise to build a small house for their first project. If children wish to help, warn them that the “fun” candy decorating stage comes last, only after the dough is made. baked, cut out and the house assembled. Patience is a must by all family members! Some mothers feel that Christmas time is for children and they turn the building over to their young ones. All that is needed is a good supply of graham crackers or any sturdy square or rectangular cookie. a Styrofoam or plywood base. ‘Designer lcing‘ and a good variety of multi-colored candies. Animalâ€"shaped cookies can l4 be added for landscaping, trees cut out of cookies. and ponds built from blue icing. There’s no limit to your children‘s imagination! Another perfect centerpiece for your Christmas table is a castle built from round cookies, stacked with layers of colorful icing, finished off with ice cream cone turrets and dinner mint battlements. Children could easily create their own versions of a summertime sandcastlel Christmas issues of women‘s magazines are filled with ideas for creating elaborate gingerbread structures. in recent years. we have been shown that warm gingerbread can be molded into curved structures such as mailboxes. sailboats and locomotive engines. Bakeries make and sell gingerbread houses. Adapt their ideas for making your very own! The following is a basic recipe for a gingerbread house from Food Specialists at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food. It can be simply decorated or made very elaborate. Here are a few hints to save you â€" read some building frustrations: the entire recipe bet starting out â€" cut out the dough only after it been baked. Due to o irregularities, the house will uneven if the dough is cut prio baking. to make the roof structure easie work with, use half the thicknes dough. The roof will be half weight and the walls will suppo- more readily. line the roof with one continu‘ piece of wax paper. Use "Desig king" and glue both flat picex the roof to the wax paper. This ' reinforce your structure U prevent it from dividing at the v peak. let the baked dough cool for at [c two hours after cutting it out :. before assembling make your house a permant structure by spraying it w» lacquer. It will keep for years! use left over dough to make cool and lawn ornaments. U children‘s coloring books it simple shape ideas. »