Gingerbread Carousel Pintrest FAIL

Hi. I know it's been a while since my last post, but hey, I DID warn you all that I am busy!!

Last month I was perusing my local Bulk Barn shop and found these adorable horse-shaped cookie cutters that immediately made me think of my friend MaryBeth who owns TomLynn Acres, a horse farm in Enniskillen Twp, Ontario. 

Another friend of mine, C (who is not a fan of social media and so shall remain unnamed), had bought a box of President's Choice gingerbread cookie mix by mistake, thinking the box contained finished cookies.  C isn't interested in baking, so she passed it along to me, so I whipped up a batch of horse-shaped cookies for MaryBeth's Christmas present and delivered them to her that weekend.  The cookies stayed soft for several days when stored in air-tight containers and had a great spicy flavour.  It is a good mix to use if you're not a fan of baking from scratch.  I would just recommend sifting the contents before mixing with your wet ingredients.

I decided to experiment with rolling methods.  Because I don't like the mess of using a floured surface, I tried rolling the dough out between two sheets of parchment paper.  This worked GREAT, especially when I cut the cookies an inch apart, then pulled away the unused dough to leave the cut pieces on the bottom piece of parchment paper.  I was able to just slide the paper with the cut cookies onto my baking sheet and pop them right into the oven.  Easy peasy!

I fell in love with the cookie cutter, and I wondered what else I could make with it.  I looked up "Gingerbread Barn" on Google and Pintrest.  Then I searched for "Gingerbread circus."  Finally, I searched for "Gingerbread Carousel."  Bingo!

The one I found was adorable! It had perfectly pipped white icing in all the right places.  It had adorable teeny tiny little horses.  It's basically just baking triangles, rectangles, and sticking them together with royal icing. 

How hard could this be?

I measured my horse cutters and decided that my carousel needed to be bigger than the template that I had found, so I printed it at 150%.  I cut out the template and felt very impressed with myself. 

I looked at the blog again.  I didn't notice any instructions.  Oops.  "How do I assemble this thing???" I wondered.  I felt intimidated. 

I procrastinated for three days.  I am a fantastic procrastinator!

I had already talked this project  up to my daughter and my friends, so I decided to suck it up and get over my fear of failure.

I used a gingerbread cookie recipe from Jean Paré's cookie book and rolled up my sleeves.  I cut out the pieces for my carousel and baked them.  As they came out of the oven, I stacked the layers of cookies on the parchment paper on top of each other and then wrapped the whole thing with plastic wrap to set overnight.

The next day I made Royal icing and put it in an icing bag finished off with a Wiltons #5 tip.  I should have used a #10 tip instead.  The icing was far too thick to come out of the piping bag.  I could have added a couple tablespoons of hot water to thin the icing out a bit, but I decided to just grab a butter knife and spread the icing on the edges of the pieces.

The roof went together easily. The centre pillar was more tricky. The pieces are long and thin, so one of the pieces had broken. I glued it together with royal icing and left it to set. 

I attached the horse cookies to candy canes and finished attaching the side panels to the roof.  I added small star-shaped cookies to the gates. 

The next day I connected the centre pillar to the base, set up the horses and gates, and then attached the roof to the pillar.  I let the icing set and then covered the whole thing in plastic wrap.

It looked really derpy.  The icing was all chunky and it looked like a mess.

I took it to our family dinner.  The grandkids loved it.  My boys liked it, too. 

Surprisingly, the gingerbread was still very soft and fresh.

I swore I would never make another one of those carousels ever again, but now that a week has passed I am looking at the experience through rose coloured glasses.  It gets easier every time we try, right?

Next time, I will definitely make the icing a little more watery and use a bigger tip.  Putting the pieces together in stages was still a good idea, but I think I will put the centre pillar together first, two sides at a time instead of three.

Lastly, during my searches I saw some finished carousels available for sale on different websites for $90 and up.  They are underpriced.  I do not want to begin to think about how one would go about packing them for shipment so they don't break! 

The template for the carousel can be found here:  http://pysselfabriken.wixsite.com/diyblog/single-post/2015/12/4/PDF-mall-till-pepparkakskarusell

The cookie recipe is in Jean Paré's Cookies cookbook.

The Royal icing recipe is two egg whites beaten with a quarter teaspoon of cream of tartar, then add 4 cups of icing sugar (confectioners sugar) and mix together.  I added two tablespoons of hot water to the mix to improve the "mortar-like" performance and texture of the icing.

Please do try this recipe/project and show me up in the comments below! 

Taking Back My Kitchen Intro

Before I was married, I was a workaholic and always on the go.  I grew up this way, too. 

My mom went back to college when I was a child, and attended university when I was a teenager.  She also had a part-time job, volunteered at our church, taxied my brother and I to lessons, friends houses, jobs, all the while driving an hour each way from our home to campus in Detroit five days a week.

Needless to say, there wasn't a lot of time for my single mother to prepare a lot of home-cooked meals while we were growing up.  We ate a lot of frozen dinners or hot dogs with a side of potato chips. 

These eating habits were made worse when I got my first "real job" at McDonald's.  It didn't help that my restaurant gave employees a free value meal for each shift worked.

When I was 18, I moved in with my grandparents and worked the crazy retail shifts that did not allow for normal eating patterns at all.  The microwave and refrigerator in the break room made frozen dinners my best friend, and the food court was another frequent grub grabbing favorite.  I ate cereal for breakfast at home, and all of my other meals and snacks came from either a box or a restaurant.

I met my husband when I was 19.  During our courtship and engagement, we did a lot of dining out.  Kelsey's Balsamic Chicken was my favorite.

If we were at his place, a typical lunch was his favorite:  Red Macaroni with Fried Bologna, which is pasta covered in tomato soup with pan-fried bologna on the side. 

After we got married, I had to cook on my days off, and I'm sure you can guess how things turned out.  My two stepdaughters came down for dinner when the smoke detector went off.  On more than one occasion, after grace, we would all take a bite, look at each other, and simultaneously say, "Let's order a pizza."

I had no idea what I was doing.  It was so bad that I actually ruined hard-boiled eggs.

I was also gaining a lot of weight.  I didn't care about being skinny, but I was tired of my age and my dress size being the same number.
Then I heard that a powerful tobacco company owned the company that manufactured one of our frequently eaten boxed macaroni and cheese meals, and I immediately wanted to know how I could stop financially supporting them.  It was difficult to do.  They make cheese, cream cheese, soups, pastas... pretty much everything that can be eaten, this company has their fingers in there.  Worse, it was all in my cupboard.

The only way to take my kitchen back was to cook from scratch.


I was terrified.  I thought that cooking from scratch meant hours spent making each meal, lots of dishes to wash, and involved apparatus that was as foreign to me as french fries were to a tribal Mongolian.  I hate doing dishes, and I have no idea what a ramekin is.  This was not going to be a small feat for me.

I decided to start with a simple recipe, and found a good one for chocolate chip cookies.  The first two batches were tolerable at best, but got better every time I tried.  Baking was easy.  The oven does most of the work.  Mixing takes a few minutes.  Doing it from scratch rather than a mix cost the same or less, and really did not take any longer.  Either way, you still need to add eggs, butter, and milk or water.

I bought a Jean Pare cookbook with recipes for muffins and breads.  Banana bread and cheese loaves were a hit.  I decided to try the pancake recipe.  Everyone in the house loved them.  I was becoming more confident.

I pulled down the dusty slow-cooker given to me at my bridal shower and tried a chicken and vegetable recipe.  It was amazing.  I was hooked. 

Cooking from scratch often added ten to twenty minutes to my prep time, but it was cheaper, healthier, and for the first time in years, my age was greater than my dress size.  Hungry for more recipes, I read the South Beach Diet book and fell in love with several recipes from there.  I had finally found a replacement for my dearly beloved Balsamic Chicken!

I still went for Sunday Brunch and got a frozen General Tao chicken meal once in a while, but no restaurant could hold a candle to my Hawaiian Chicken! 

After my youngest son was born, I found out that I have a dietary condition called Gastro-esophageal Reflux Disorder, which is basically extreme heartburn.  I had to become even more aware of what I ate.  We also just recently learned that my oldest son is allergic to eggs.  Our food explorations have become more interesting.

My attention was turned to cleaning products a few years ago.  I never thought twice about what I used to clean with, I just grabbed the bottle that read "Tile Cleaner," "Window Cleaner," etc.  I didn't know how cleaning solvents were made, much less how to make them myself.

Three of my four children have asthma, though the older two have grown out of it.  My husband and two of our children have various allergies.  Their symptoms all seemed to flare up after I used cleaning products. 

I'm not here to knock food and chemical companies.  I personally love the smell of pine-scented floor cleaners, but I wanted to explore ways for me and my family to be more environmentally friendly, save some money, and eat healthier.  There are a lot of websites, magazines, and books that are very helpful.  I hope to share some of what I've learned with you glorious people.

I will save the revolutionizing of food and environmental practices to other persons.  This just works for my family, and maybe you want to try something new yourself.  I am not a stay-at-home soccer mom.  I work for North America's largest independent financial services company, help my husband manage and run his moving company, and sing with The International Symphony Orchestra.  I'm busy.  I don't have tons of time to spend in the kitchen, and I'm sure you don't, either.

I'm writing this to empower others to take as much of this information as they want to and not be as intimidated by the kitchen as I once was.  Oh, and keep the batteries in your smoke detectors, please!