I am a fanatic about everything being edible, which means no supporting sticks or skewers allowed–and I insist that everything apart from the gingerbread and the royal icing is made out of store-bought candy. Could I make an amazing, edible gingerbread creation with marzipan or fondant? Absolutely. But to me, that’s kind of cheating, because I might as well just make it out of clay at that point. So my rules are pretty strict and this year was no exception, although we did use some edible silver spray to modernize some areas of the landscape.

MJ and Marghi worked the marshmallow Santa into his sweet (literally) UFO, made of gingerbread circles with a melted jolly rancher windshield, with a few gumdrops for structure and a Nerds rope for decoration.

Marghi & Mitra worked with me on the George Jetson-inspired tower houses, with stacks of gingerbread sprayed silver and lined up atop jujubes, jolly ranchers, lifesavers, gumballs, and Reese’s white chocolate peanut butter cups.

Miscellaneous candy antennae and other skyward protrusions, made with Ice Cubes gum, mini marshmallows, jujubes, gumdrops, gummy trees, and red licorice provide the final adornment for the stilted futuristic dwellings.

Once again Radha did much of the fine detail work and painstakingly laid out the lunar surface, using gray and black M&Ms, Sno-Caps, Hershey’s Oreo discs, cracked silver gumballs, blue and white York peppermint drops, crushed white lifesavers, mini marshmallows. Marghi and I worked out the big gingerbread slab for the backdrop, covered in black icing and studded with snowflake and pearl candy stars–and a highly inaccurate earth, hewn from blue sour belts and carved green gummies.

New guy Alex, who conveniently knows his way around a real-life construction site, was key in fence construction and final placement of the black night sky (and believe me when I say, you need someone calm and collected to manhandle a large, delicate panel of frosted, candy-laden gingerbread to get it vertical.) The reindeer were sprayed silver and penned in a gingerbread fence – and are eating silvery nuts and bolts.

Some details in case you’re wondering…

• I got the majority of the candy at Walgreen’s, but I found a few specialty items at a big party store, like the gray and black single color packs of M&Ms and the silver gumballs.
• The gingerbread project is constructed on two cutting boards taped together with packing tape and covered in aluminum foil.
• The recipe I use for gingerbread is this one – it smells great, it’s sturdy and long-lasting, and it’s easy to work with.
• The icing is key for this, because it acts as the glue. You can make royal icing with egg whites and powdered sugar, beat to fluffy. I don’t use a recipe, I just put a few egg whites and a lot of powdered sugar together and keep adding more of one or the other until it’s viscous enough to use as glue. If you leave it open to the air, it will harden, so you can put it in a ziploc bag and cut a hole in the corner and use that as your “glue gun.” For fine detail, use a smaller bag and cut a smaller hole. If you want to color the icing, use paste food coloring to get rich colors – which is how we got the icing on the sky backdrop black.
• Now that the party’s over, I’m going to let my nieces and nephew eat it. They usually just pick the candy off and leave the gingerbread for the compost pile!

Here are some other gingerbread projects I think are particularly inspired!

• Gingerbread AT-AT by Blackmarket Bakery
• Super-detailed version of the Weasley house, The Burrows, from Harry Potter
• Scout Regalia’s gingerbread geodesic dome (you can buy a kit for $25 to make your own)
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water - creator unknown

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Cakes in jars are great for a picnic or to bring to someone’s house, since they’re completely sturdy, sealable, and portable. Rainbow cakes in a jar are also the perfect treat for all your unicorn friends.

“What’s that, magical horsie? Oh, you’re very welcome, it was my pleasure. I hope you enjoy your cake.”

I made them in pint-sized jars, which is definitely at least a 2-person serving. Half-pint jars would be much more sensible for individual servings! These were for the Food Blogger Bake Sale, so I dug out some circular labels left over from my wedding and marked the jars on top.

Here’s how you do it…

Super Duper Rainbow Cakes – in a Jar

• Buy 6 pint-sized, wide mouth jars (or 12 half-pint jars.) It’s important to use wide mouth jars so you can maneuver the cake batter around. I ran them through the dishwasher and made sure they were completely dry before getting started.
• Preheat the oven to 375. Make a double recipe of your favorite white cake or two boxes of white cake mix. I used Amy Sedaris’s vanilla cake recipe.
• Divide the batter roughly between 6 bowls. Color the batter with rainbow colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. It’s important to use gel or paste food coloring, not the liquid kind, or the colors won’t be as vibrant. I colored the batter with Wilton’s gel food coloring which always works great!
• Now, to layer the batter in the jars; this would make a GREAT personality test. You can either drop dollops of the colors in the jar in order, and let the colors fall where they may. That would be the “laid back” personality type. I did sort of a “Type A Minus” personality thing, by carefully spooning the batter into the jars and attempting to spread each color out somewhat evenly but not perfectly. The “Type A Plus” thing to do would be to put the batter color into individual Ziploc bags or pastry bags and pipe each layer, so you would get near perfection. Choose your style and get that batter in there! You only need to fill the jars to about 3/4 full as the cake will rise.
• Put the jars in a pan with sides, like a 9×13 brownie pan. Put the pan in the preheated oven and pour in about 1/2 inch of water.
• Bake for about 40-45 minutes, until a knife or skewer inserted all the way down comes out clean.
• Remove from the oven, take out of the water, and set aside to cool.

(When you open your oven, you get this visual treat:)

But we’re not quite done! On to the frosting…

• Use a knife to cut off some of the top of the cake to make room for the frosting. If you really really really like frosting, scoop out some of the middle of the cake, too. (The pieces you cut off kind of look like psychedelic mini cupcakes–save those for a kid you like.)
• Make white frosting. I made a half recipe of Magnolia Bakery’s vanilla buttercream, which is my favorite.
• Use a small spatula to scoop frosting on top of the cakes, almost to the top.
• Cover with a lid and brighten people’s day!

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When my older sister was about 9, my mom made her this legendary multi-tiered cake that was all white on the outside but with each layer of the cake being a different color of the rainbow, arranged, natch, in rainbow order. I re-created a similar cake about 4 years ago when my niece Leila turned 5, with a chocolate outside and a strong structural resemblance to the leaning tower of Pisa. Yesterday my other niece Mitra turned 5, and got her very own rainbow cake, thanks to the combined efforts of my sister and I.

The kids go CRAZY when you cut into it- but believe me, it’s not easy to cut into it. The cake comes out super tall and huge, so much so that out of 6 or 7 kids yesterday, only 1 ate the whole piece (but I’m not naming names. *cough* Nico *cough*.)

So how do you make this beaut? It’s actually not as hard as it looks. We just use 2 yellow cake mixes (the yellow cake mix renders richer colors than the white.) Mix the cake mixes as usual, divide the whole lot evenly among 6 bowls and use regular food color to get the different colors. (Birthday girl Mitra was the colorizer for this particular cake and I think she did a fine job of getting the job done.)  Bake each layer separately, cool, then stack, gluing together each layer with a bit of icing. There is actually a fair amount of icing between each layer, but it gets smooshed down by the sheer weight of the thing. Ice the entire outside and decorate with candles and/or sprinkles. If it starts tipping over or seeming teetery, stick some wooden skewers in it in a couple of places and take them out right before cutting. Voila! Rainbow cake! A mid-icing shot:

The icing our mom used so many years ago and that we used yesterday is a version of that fluffy marshmallowy meringue-y 7-minute icing. You can use any icing but this one sets up a bit and adds some structural integrity- as long as it’s not out too long. You should definitely ice this puppy the same day as the party if you use this type of icing. Here is the easy shortcut recipe in the appropriate amount to easily cover and fill this giant monstrosity.

No-Boil 7-Minute Icing

Ingredients:

• 6 egg whites
• 1 1/2 cup sugar
• 1-2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp cream of tartar
• 1/2 cup boiling water

Method:

• In the bowl of a Kitchen-Aid, combine everything except boiling water with the whisk attachment.
• While whisking, slowly pour in boiling water.
• Beat about 7 minutes, until mixture holds stiff peaks.
• Use immediately or texture will become weird and won’t spread easily.

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This is what I picture Santa doing the day after Christmas… parking his sleigh somewhere tropical and hopping in the pool with a frosty beverage.

Seeing as he’s Kris Kringle and all, it makes perfect sense that he’d opt for a resort that features Twizzler tiles and a sour belt lawn chair.

We got pretty carried away with the setting! The bar is one of my favorite parts, actually. The Christmas lights, constructed by my detail-oriented sister Marghi, and the bar stool by MJ, are too too divine!

MJ also worked out a highly realistic beach-side firepit.

The lush tropical garden is another highlight! Amazing how sour straws can make grass, foliage, palm leaves, and so forth. Radha lovingly formed each blade of grass by hand. Marghi rocked the teeny tiny birds of paradise.

In my opinion, crushed jolly ranchers (or lifesavers) are the unsung heroes of many a good gingerbread extravaganza. They add body and texture to your garden. And sprinkles! Don’t forget them as a finishing touch.

The jolly ranchers, melted, also make the cabana’s candy windows. The cabana has a triscuit and banana chip roof. There were some structural issues pointed out by self-proclaimed “editing eye” Roberto that were helped out with some Pepperidge Farms pirouette cookies. He also crushed a lot of sand for us. You might be surprised to know that 7-year-old Mitra provided the perfect keystone piece to hold up the whole roof! Luckily Radha and Marghi were constructionist queens and got the whole thing standing up and solid.

Lots of happy little fishies in the candy sea. Wouldn’t you be happy in a candy sea?!?

Merry Christmas Santa! Hope you enjoy the tropics this year.

Here’s the breakdown of what’s what:

• Cabana windows: crushed jolly ranchers baked into the gingerbread
• Cabana curtains: rainbow sour belts
• Cabana roof: triscuits and banana chips
• Christmas lights: licorice wheel and jujubes
• Swimming pool: crushed jolly ranchers baked into the gingerbread
• Pool tile floor: twizzler pieces
• Pool steps: Kit Kats
• Palm trees: pirouette cookies and sour straws
• Lawn chair: Kit Kats and rainbow sour belts
• Bar: gingerbread, triscuits, banana chips, white chocolate covered pretzels, gummy coke bottles
• Bar stool: white chocolate covered pretzel with gummy peaches
• Fire pit: licorice wheels, gingerbread logs, jolly ranchers, sour straws, Hershey’s oreo bites
• Garden: sour straws, spearmint gummies, gummy frogs, Reese’s peanut butter cups, gummy peaches, Jelly Belly candy canes, Hershey’s oreo bites, crushed jolly ranchers
• Rock edging: yogurt-covered raisins and Hershey’s oreo bites
• Grass: sour straws
• Sand: crushed triscuits, gingerbread, and yellow sprinkles
• Sea: tic-tacs, Sno-Caps, Mounds bites, Mike & Ike’s tropical, Tootsie pop bites, crushed jolly ranchers, gummy clownfish, Swedish fish, green sprinkles

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So, this year I wanted to try natural Easter egg dye, so I enlisted my nieces and nephews for some experiments. First, I put some dye on the kids to see if they would get a rash. Oh my gosh not really! I didn’t mean that kind of experiment. That would be horrible. I meant I enlisted them to help me experiment with dying eggs. So first, we boiled red cabbage for 30 minutes and then dyed eggs in it. They turned bright blue! They had to sit in the dye for a couple of hours, but still! For the yellows, we used turmeric (for the darker ones) and saffron flowers (for the lighter ones.) It wasn’t real saffron, it was something called saffron flowers that was $1.69 for a whole bag. I don’t know what it was. But we’re on a need to know basis, and all I know is that it was a bag of little red thingies that kind of looked like saffron and made the eggs light yellow. My mom was seriously stressed about the turmeric because turmeric stains everything. So be careful with that one. I wanted to try beets for red eggs but beets are gross. Maybe by next year I’ll be mature enough to handle beets. Probably not.

So then we tried this other crazy technique from Serious Eats where you put stuff from your garden on a raw egg, then wrap it in onion skins, then fabric, then boil for 10 minutes. We did some in onion and some in cabbage. The cabbage ones are the lighter ones. It was like a fun science experiment and the kids really liked it! You know, for a really short time as kids do. On some you could totally make out the leaf and flower patterns!

So go ahead – bookmark this shit and then somewhere around November you’ll be like, what is this bookmark, why am I saving something for Easter? What the hell? And then just forget about it and go on with your life. You’re welcome. And happy Easter.

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Last year I cut up some old neckties from a thrift store and made these gorgeous silk-dyed eggs… a stunning result from a surprisingly simple project!

These lemon raspberry cake balls kind of look like eggs, and the white chocolate is an Easter-y shade…

You can use the Chinese Tea-Egg concept and make these cool crackly-looking eggs…

After which, the crackly eggs can become deliciously deviled.

This year, I’m planning to do that thing where you use only natural dyes like turmeric, beets, grass, and onion skins to color the eggs. I might try some more of the silk ones too, because those were a big hit. But I’m not one of those bloggers who makes stuff in advance to blog about it in a timely fashion, ie BEFORE Easter, because I’m LAZY and don’t want to make things twice. No worries, it will be in next year’s roundup, or perhaps somewhat inappropriately posted next week.

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• Bitter Superhero Valentines – get them at Shirt.Woot

• Pun-laden Science Geek Valentines – get them at Neatorama

• Pun-laden Science Geek Valentines, the cartoon version – get them at Ironic Sans

• Edible Dog Biscuit Cards for your Dog – yikes – get them at Crunchkins

• Anti-Valentines by Dylan Edwards- get them on his site

• Disturbing Pimp Valentine’s Card – see it at StrangeCosmos

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This is the (amazing, delicious, if you love cheese don’t miss it!) cheese shop in Neal’s Yard, London, that makes a lovely subtle palette.

This photo of Confucius’ Temple in Beijing yields a spicy palette- I think it would make a cool kids room.

This is a horse farm in Kentucky – which gives me a gorgeous palette that makes me want to redo a room right this second! I think my bedroom would do well with this.

You can play with it at Big Huge Labs. Hopefully you will have more restraint than me and not become addicted to it. If you’re clever, you can use this color conversion chart and get something to bring to the paint shop! OK gotta go, I have thousands more photos to try.

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The gingerbread casbah came into being because every year, we throw a themed Christmas party for around 100 of our closest friends. Since we just took a honeymoon to the Middle East, we thought we could try out some new tricks at a Middle East-themed Christmas party. After all, that is where the whole Christmas thing started, right? An evite full of bad puns later (“we are Beiruting for you to come”, and so forth) we had our “Christmas at the Casbah” party ready to go, and all we needed was an impressive centerpiece.

This is not really a casbah, but a typical courtyard house. (Casbah sounds cooler though, so that’s more of a marketing-focused name for it.) On our honeymoon, we stayed in a beautiful hotel in Old City of Damascus called Beit Al Mamlouka, and I very loosely modeled the casbah on my recollections of how it looked. I say “very loosely” because their floors weren’t made of sour belts and jujubes, and their walls weren’t edible.

For the gingerbread, I used a recipe that C&H tweeted me- and it was great. Alas, I haven’t actually tasted it, but from a construction point of view it was tops – simple to make, very easy to roll out, not too sticky, sturdy, and kept its shape during baking. Also, it smells delicious, which adds a nice extra sensory dimension to the house. The royal icing that glues the whole thing together is just a stiff mixture of egg whites and powdered sugar with a pinch of cream of tartar, mixed with the paddle attachment of a Kitchen-Aid.

I did most of the shape-cutting freehand, but used a star cutters for the front windows. To make the windows, we rolled out the dough and put it on a silpat. Then we cut shapes out and arranged crushed jolly ranchers inside. When they baked, they became clear and solid. You have to let them cool while carefully loosening them from the silpat, as the candy stays soft and molten for about 30 minutes after coming out of the oven. Once they harden fully, they are structurally quite sound.

I thought that doing this alone would be both boring and incredibly frustrating and also not come out as well, so I assembled a crack team to help out. Rodney the pastry chef is always an excellent addition to this type of team, and did lots of the rolling, fine icing work, and construction assistance. Heather took care of cobblestones and windows, while MJ formed small furnishings including the excellent hookah.

I am a firm believer that everything on a true gingerbread house should be edible, and should be candy. Also, I can make like anything out of marzipan or fondant- ergo, marzipan and fondant are cheating. Sculpting something out of a tootsie roll is so much more impressive. So I refused to allow any non-edible, non-candy/gingerbread/icing objects adorn the house.

I bought electric flicker tea lights to illuminate it during the party, to make the windows shine. Merry Christmas everyone!

Here’s the breakdown of what’s what:

• Windows: crushed jolly ranchers baked into the gingerbread
• Tile floor: rainbow sour belts, jujubes, licorice wheels, and silver dragees
• Balcony floors: red hots, tic tacs, and silver dragees
• Balcony railings: sesame candies, licorice wheels (unrolled), jujubes
• Cobblestones: formed tootsie roll slices with yellow sprinkles
• Hanging lamps: licorice wheels and Haribo raspberry gummies
• Hookah: deconstructed tootsie rolls, sour belts, and licorice wheels
• Table: gingerbread star with dragees and jujubes
• Chair: sesame candies and tootsie rolls
• Tree: iced cookie with Haribo raspberry gummy and tootsie roll
• Camels: iced cookies with sprinkles

I wasn’t able to find any other instances of Middle Eastern gingerbread architecture on the web, but I did come across some gingerbread structures of note. Here are a few of my favorites from around teh interwebz.

• Max’s cave from Where The Wild Things Are, from A Table for Two <<<btw, AMAZING!!!>>>
• Gingerbread Houseboat from Houseboat Eats
• Gingerbread Woodcutters Cabin from Sweetopia
• Not gingerbread, bacon and licorice house from Almost Bourdain
• Cool 2 story house by Brown Sugar Bee

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1. You can print out these free gift tags from Angry Chicken, there are a bunch of designs.

2. You can get creative with a stamp pad and your thumb for these cute owl tags I saw on Design*Sponge.

Cute, and FREE if you already own cardstock or pilfer a few sheets from the office! (I said a few sheets. I’m not advocating widespread office supply fraud. Put down that ream of paper and all of those staplers. You don’t even need that many staplers anyway.)

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