The Gingerbread House is typically associated with Christmas but I don’t see why you couldn’t use a gingerbread design to celebrate many of the Holidays we share this time of year.  It doesn’t even have to be a house, the beauty of gingerbread is you can carve it and make it into just about any design you desire.

Now it all starts with a good, simple recipe that is easy to cut into shapes and holds those shapes well when it bakes.  I found this one on Epicurious.  This makes plenty of gingerbread to build a good sized design.  If you plan to eat the gingerbread, I would add more of each of the spices.  It’s good as is, but for my tastes, it would be better with a bit more spice.  Oh and you don’t need to let the dough sit for 6 hours.  1 hour is really all the dough needs.  So start out by making your dough and get it into the fridge to chill.

Now create a design.  That same recipe offers a great starting point with a simple house.  I recommend actually drawing out their house on paper or cardboard and assembling it to give you a sense of scale and how much the gingerbread will build.  I felt like I had enough gingerbread to make about 2 of those houses from the amount of gingerbread the recipe made.  Now that you know the scale of the original house, design something yourself.

I was inspired by a classic 1970’s TV home.  No particular reason other than it seemed like a silly, fun thing to build.  So I started by drawing and cutting out the various pieces.

You really need to draw it all out AND assemble the house to make sure it all comes together.   I highly recommend an Xacto or Sheetrock knife to cut the paper using a straight edge.   Just tape the pieces together and make sure it comes together like you want it to.  Oh and label all the pieces so you remember what they are when you break the template apart to cut the gingerbread.

The roof was the trickiest part because it’s a two piece roof with a long slope on one end of the front of the house with a side roof coming in at a steep angle.   I was able to make it work, not perfectly but good enough to cover the mistakes with icing later.

Now it was time to cut the shapes into gingerbread.   I put parchment paper on either side of the dough as I rolled it out to keep it from sticking to the board and the roller.  Then laid the template shapes onto the dough and cut through both layers of parchment.  Remove the top layer of gingerbread, but LEAVE the bottom layer attached to keep it from sticking to the baking pan.

Something to keep in mind is that any pieces that will be inside the house and not seen, such as supports for the roof, can actually be cut out of stiff cardboard.  There’s no need to bake interior supports.  This was my very first gingerbread house so I didn’t think of that, but I will next year!

Now you bake the pieces, let cool completely and start assembling.  Well actually I recommend you do a bit of the decorating while the pieces are flat as it’s easier.  The royal icing was always a bit too thick, it really does need to be a bit thinner to be more sticky to hold the pieces.  Just cut the corner of a ziplock bag to use for piping the icing.  As you assemble, anything that you have pre-attached to the walls may fall off, but you can just stick them back on.

Be sure to have a nice solid platform to build your house on such as a thick cardboard base.  I cut a piece of thick cardboard and covered it with parchment paper.  This makes it easy to move the house around once it’s built.

I’ll admit the initial assembly of the house was a bit ugly.  Could not get the first three walls to stand up square.  I ended up putting a piece of cardboard in as support to help these first pieces stay up and used a few coffee mugs to keep the very heavy “gumdrop wall” from falling forward.  Then it was actually fairly easy to get all the walls up.  Some of the baked walls didn’t quite line up, but that’s what icing and decorations are for!

For trimming the baked pieces, you need a REALLY sharp knife, such a straight razor knife and a light touch.  Just let the sharp blade do all the work with just a little pressure.  It took me about 10 cuts across the gingerbread to get it to cut all the way through, but I didn’t break anything and got clean cuts.

So this project took one day.  A lazy Sunday afternoon and it was fun.   It was a reminder that the Holidays should be fun.  So get your hands a little dirty, make something silly and have a little fun!  Save the stress for when you’re back in the office.

Oh and in case you’re wondering, it was “The Brady Bunch” house that was the inspiration for my design.  I drew my design from this photo.  Why be normal, right?

The post Take Time for Fun over the Holidays! appeared first on WalterBiscardi.com.

One of the biggest problems for me is keeping track of all my recipes.  Not only family recipes passed down, but even those I find online.  Bookmarking online recipes and storing printed recipes in files and such, well it became frustrating to find anything when I literally have 1000’s of recipes around.

2 years ago I found the Paprika Recipe Manager and holy cow, did that bring a complete change to how we store recipes,  cook and shop.   It works on pretty much every device and every OS which is great when you have Mac, Windows, Android and iOS devices in the house like we do.    I have the app on my MacBook Air, Samsung Galaxy Tablet and my iPhone.    Here’s what it looks like on the Mac.

Not only are all of my recipes stored in the app, but you can see everything is easily categorized, even with subcategories like you see in Dessert and Indian.  My wife is a Vegetarian so for each cuisine I separate the Vegetarian dishes to make it super easy to find those.

The BEST part about this app is the Browser feature.  It’s a built in web browser so I can search for and save online recipes directly within the app.   Here I’m on the Food Network website and I searched for grouper and selected this great sounding recipe from Bobby Flay.

  You see down on the bottom right of the page the “Save Recipe” button.  Simply click that and….

Paprika grabs all the pertinent information to create a new recipe card in the app.  I’m selecting Seafood from the drop down category list.    Click “Save” and…..

I have the full recipe card ready to go including a funny picture of Bobby Flay and his cat.   That was the only photo on the page so Paprika grabbed it thinking it was the photo of the plate.  I can easily change that photo when I make the dish or go look for a photo of it.   If the app can’t grab the recipe automatically you can go see in the earlier images the buttons for “Name,” “Ingredients,” “Directions” and so on at the bottom of the screen.  This allows you to manually highlight the individual elements of the recipe on the page and automatically bring them into a new recipe.  It’s quite easy for sites that for whatever reason won’t automatically import.

My wife found this AWESOME gooseneck tablet stand for the Samsung Galaxy tablet that we keep near the stove and use it like a cookbook stand.  It keeps the tablet raised up off the counter so it’s out of the way of ingredients and the base weighs about 3 pounds so it’s solid and won’t get knocked over easily.   It’s a universal stand so it works with multiple types of tablets.

Most recently I’ve been loading up a lot of mixology recipes as I have been exploring the wonderful world of cocktails.  So if you like to cook or only cook on occasion, I highly recommend this app to get you organized and allow you to be more creative in your cooking.

The post Managing your Recipes. Another “Get A Life” tip appeared first on WalterBiscardi.com.

With Walter’s past experience on “Good Eats with Alton Brown” which was greatly inspired by Bill Nye, it’s been a very smooth process to take the needs of the school curriculum and give it the “Bill Nye” touch.  We’re shooting at a local high school laboratory and we’ve brought along 4 high school students to serve at Production Assistants and Science Assistants.  Their energy has been incredible, even whipping around a set change in just 15 minutes so we could knock out the most complex shot of the entire 5 days of shooting before breaking for the day. Here’s some looks at the shoot so far!

Two days down, three to go in production. Actor Ian Gregg has just been amazing nailing his lines most every take. We’re actually ahead of schedule by one shot going into our final day at our main Lab studio at a local high school. A long grueling, outdoor day is coming up Thursday with temps in the low 90’s and high humidity outside.  Our crew is up for the challenge.   We’re shooting for the first time with the Sony a7s being manned by Cheryl Collins.  Full article will come after we’re done but here’s a quick look at the first two days of Production!
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BISCARDI CREATIVE MEDIA is a full service digital media production company near Atlanta, Georgia with services that include Video Production, Sound Production, Sound Mixing, Graphic Design, Animation, Post Production, Video Editing, Color Grading, Finishing, Digital Asset Transfer, Digitizing and Archiving. Quite simply we’re the people who make video and media production easy for you.   No technobabble.  Just clear, concise and creative content delivered where and how you need it, on time and on budget.  Office and production space is also available for short and long term projects.  www.biscardicreative.com | 770-271-3427
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