Da Huuuuuudge
[mistakes that can be made when one follows a recipe without thinking]
Every year on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, a country club near Greenwich, CN hosts a brunch. It's a family affair, during which the children can make gingerbread houses slathered in candies and frosting and all things horrible to tooth enamel. My roommate always goes to this annual gingerbread house-making, and has brought her creation back to our room at school for the past few years. Amidst the end of semester scramble, this confection-decoration served as the only symbol that we recognized the coming holidays. However, that little construction still made quite the difference in the atmosphere of our 130 sq ft living space. Primarily in making me crave gingerbread: making, eating and smelling the molasses and spices. How often my thoughts drifted to this delightful process while grinding on my studies through all hours of the night.
Thus, by the end of the semester, I had three distinct goals for my vacation time: sleep, sleep in front of a fire and make gingerbread.
I set forth upon the first of these goals fairly immediately, and had conquered both of the first two within a day's time of coming home. The third one, however, proved to be a more admirable enemy. It was not until last night, did I finally manage to vanquish it. Truth be told, this was not for lack of trying. I was severely hindered in my progress, by an unfortunate episode that set me back in both spirit and ingredients.
My mom is an avid cook and as such, has an old family recipe book that she's been keeping since she first moved out of her parents' house. As any good recipe book should be, it's covered in food and grease and the old family recipes have been copied several times to new, less food-stain reincarnations. For such a holiday classic as gingerbread, it seemed quite appropriate to consult said tome of traditional kitchen wisdom.
My sister and I pulled out the gingerbread recipe and got to work. We had some doubts when we were facing the ingredients list, but we persisted. It was, afterall, a classic recipe from my mom's family - a recipe for gingerbread without molasses, without brown sugar, with very little butter, ginger, sugar and everything tasty and instead with a healthy dosage of sour cream. But we held to our faith, carefully cutting out the pieces for little gingerbread houses to make and men to frost faces on. How could the recipe mislead us - coming from what appeared to be such a reliable source. Our confidence in this assumption held until the first batch came out of the oven.
The questionable molasses-less dough had puffed up into lumpy, misshapen, pale blobs - no magical process had occurred in the oven to transform the dough. This was not gingerbread. The monstrosities that we had made were the texture of unfortunately moist scones, with a very light ginger flavor - at their best, they could serve as chewy, floury accompaniments for a cup of black tea drunk with a pinky finger in the air. Where was our crispy, (yet chewy if thick enough), flavorful old-school gingerbread? Why had we not seen from the recipe?
My mom, perhaps not quite understanding our disappointment, cheerfully commented on how her family had spent a while looking for a gingerbread recipe that did not require the use of molasses because her younger sister didn't like it. It was then that we began to realize how we had gone wrong. We had been foolish to assume that this recipe was anything other than something that had been a good idea in the 60's and 70's white-american kitchen of my mom's family. A few valiant attempts were made to correct for this mess - my sister suggested an egg-yolk and sugar-coating to give a little golden crispness and round the flavor. A horrible fail. (This resultant yellow, chewy blob was subsequently named Da Huuuuuudge). We were thoroughly defeated.
And therefore, we went to the internet to try again. I'll recommend the Joy of Baking Gingerbread men recipe for your gingerbread needs. Pictures included have a comparison. It also appears as though the lumpy, huuuuuuudge gingerbread man is violating another one of the men. Unintentional.
