Daring Bakers Challenge: Gingerbread Point Sur Lighthouse

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

This month, the Daring Bakers were challenged to build a gingerbread house.  I knew instantly that I wanted to do something a little bit different than the typical holiday house.  It only took me a few moments to decide what I wanted to build.

During a recent trip to Big Sur we took a tour of the Point Sur lighthouse.  I am fascinated with lighthouses, as they all have unique and interesting stories.  The Point Sur Lighthouse is no exception.

My favorite piece of history about the Point Sur Lighthouse is the story of the USS Macon airship, which sank just off Point Sur.  To read more about this lighthouse, visit Lighthousefriends.com.

With this photo as inspiration, my first task was to create patterns for the gingerbread pieces.  But where to start?  I had no idea where to start and what scale to use.  So I just jumped in and started drawing shapes on cardstock, cutting them out to ensure that they would fit together to resemble the lighthouse.

I used these patterns to cut out the gingerbread pieces after rolling out the dough.  During baking, the pieces shrank.  So I trimmed them as best I could to make the edges straight and hoped that they would still fit together.

Once the gingerbread pieces had cooled I made the windows and lighthouse lens out of hard candy.  The recipe I used is included at the end of this post.  For the windows, I placed the gingerbread pieces onto a foil-lined baking sheet.  I used a small amount of butter to grease the foil directly under the window cavities.

I molded the lighthouse lens pieces in small ramekins.  I would recommend using something flexible, such as silicon, because I had a difficult time removing the candy from the ramekins once it had hardened.

Next, it was time to start assembly!  I whipped up some royal icing to use as cement.  I was surprised at how quickly the icing dried.  I had been expecting to use all kinds of props and a huge amount of patience to hold the pieces together.  After all the trouble I had baking the gingerbread, I found that assembling the lighthouse was the easy part!

You can see how unevenly the pieces baked.  This was because I had a huge amount of trouble rolling out the dough and getting it to hold its shape.  But the lighthouse is holding together!

The roofs were the hardest part.  I really had to hold each piece in place until it dried.  My patience paid off, and the roof stayed put!

I needed a light source to light the windows from within.  I found some of those squeeze LED lights around the house and taped them up in such a way that they stayed lit.  I placed them inside each area of the lighthouse.  The tower light needed to be raised up so that it would shine through the window.

One of the lights went out after a few minutes, but the other two remained on long enough to get a few pictures.

For the lighthouse lens I stacked the two hard candy pieces from the ramekins.  Thankfully the lighthouse tower did not give out under the weight, since they’re a little heavy.

The lighthouse tower features Andes mint walkways, a roof made of orange slice candy, and a white chocolate truffle to top it off.

And, the back view:

All in all, a very fun challenge!

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

I used the Scandinavian gingerbread recipe chosen by Y. Below is the recipe that she posted, followed by the method that I used to create the gingerbread pieces.

Scandinavian Gingerbread (Pepparkakstuga)
From The Great Scandinavian Baking Book by Beatrice Ojakangas

1 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup brown sugar, well packed
2 tablespoons cinnamon
4 teaspoons ground ginger
3 teaspoons ground cloves
2 teaspoons baking soda (I omitted this to avoid having puffy pieces that wouldn’t fit together)
1/2 cup boiling water
5 cups all-purpose flour

In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the cinnamon, ginger and cloves and mix well. Add the flour and boiling water and mix to make a stiff dough. At this point, my dough was the consistency of dry crumbs. I added three more tablespoons of hot water, mixing after each addition, to get the dough to come together.

Roll the dough out in between two pieces of plastic wrap. This is somewhat difficult, but it’s the only way I could get the dough to mostly stay together. I rolled the dough to about 1/4″ in thickness, but I think it would be better to get it thinner if you can. Place the dough, still in the plastic wrap, on a cookie sheet and refrigerate for about 30 minutes or until firm.

Remove the dough from the fridge and peel off the top sheet of plastic wrap. Cover the dough with a piece of parchment paper and flip it over onto the cookie sheet so that the parchment side is facing down. Peel off the other sheet of plastic wrap.

Use your templates and a sharp paring knife to cut out the shapes. If you’re making windows and doors, remember to cut them out at this point!  Remove the scraps from in between the shapes and set aside to reroll for the next batch.

Preheat the oven to 375°.  Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the dough appears dry and firm.  After baking, place the templates over the pieces while they are still warm, and trim to size again if necessary.  Mine actually shrank slightly during baking, so I just made sure that the sides were (relatively) straight.  Let the pieces cool on the baking sheet.

Hard Candy
From Baking 911

2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup water
3/4 cup light corn syrup

In a saucepan, combine the sugar, water, and corn syrup.  Cook over medium-high heat, stirring constantly until the sugar dissolves.

Continue to cook without stirring until the liquid reaches the hard crack stage (300°F).  Keep an eye on the candy thermometer, and lower the heat as the temperature gets close to 300°.  Turn off the heat and pour (very carefully – it’s hot!) into window cavities or other molds.  Allow to cool until hard (about 30 minutes to one hour).