As promised, let’s talk about the gingerbread part of that cake. 

I’d never constructed anything with homemade gingerbread, and I did zero recipe testing ahead of time, so I was feeling pretty nervous at the start. However, the process soon started to feel like old hat — mostly because I got lots of practice because I kept messing up (dang math!), but also because the recipe was so darn fantastic.

Here, let me count the ways:

• It’s a snap to make.
• It’s easy to roll and cut.
• It holds its shape while baking.
• It’s tasty. 
• It’s sturdy.
• It has a great shelf-life.
• It’s fun to use!

The dough is super simple — no eggs or leavening agents — and once mixed, it gets stored at room temperature. In other words, there’s no finicky chilling/warming to mess with the dough’s usability. Once made, it’s ready to go.

Thanks to all the spices, the gingerbread is pretty yummy, and while it’s baking it makes the house smell like Christmas, but the texture is wonky — a weird tacky snappy that’s probably a result of all the corn syrup. But that didn’t stop me from dipping countless bits of the crispy gingerbread into the bowl of cream cheese frosting!

To shape, roll the dough out on floured parchment, cut the shapes you want (templates makes this step a breeze), making sure to leave a little dough around the outside edges to prevent the cut pieces from spreading. And then — this is the important part — immediately after pulling the gingerbread from the oven, re-cut along the scored lines with a knife or pizza cutter.

If you don’t, the dough will quickly harden into a rock, making any tidy last-minute trimmings an absolute impossibility. 

Trust me. This I know.

Once baked, cut, and cooled, the pieces can sit out at room temperature, uncovered, for days. I noticed a slight softening after a few days, but it was still firm enough to be absolutely trustworthy. 

Now that I’ve jumped into the world of gingerbread construction, I keep thinking of other things I might build: mainly, pimped-out gingerbread models of actual structures I know and love. Now that might be a baking project my husband and I could do together. 

No, I take that back. We don’t work well together so we’d each have to build our own structure. Ooo, how about a merry marital Christmas Construction Competition?

hot caramel is sticky and messy. . . and scary

Though considering he’s an actual builder, he’d have an unfair advantage. 

random ginger-beam supports because fondant is heavy

Gingerbread To Build With
Adapted from Serious Eats.

A single batch makes a very small amount of dough — enough to fill one cookie sheet. I recommend making at least a double batch, and maybe a quadruple or more, depending on the size of your structure. 

A half teaspoon of black pepper would be a nice addition.

175 grams all-purpose flour
56 grams brown sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 ¼ teaspoons ginger
1 ¼ teaspoons ground cloves
⅛ teaspoon salt
45 grams butter, room temperature
115 grams corn syrup
7 grams vanilla

Mix all the ingredients together. Cover with plastic and store at room temperature

shaping:
Lightly flour a piece of parchment paper that fits the cookie sheet you’ll be using. Put the parchment on the table and the dough on the paper. Flour the top of the dough. Roll it to a ¼ inch thickness (or thinner), adding more flour as needed. 

Place the templates on the dough. Using a paring knife or pizza cutter, cut around them. Peel away the extra dough, leaving a small amount around the cut shapes so they don’t spread while baking. Scraps of dough can be re-rolled or mixed with a little water to make it pipe-able and then piped onto parchment in a variety of finicky shapes, like for porch railings and fancy curlicues and window frames, etc, and then baked. 

baking:
Transfer the parchment paper to the cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 12-20 minutes, depending on the thickness of your dough, until the gingerbread is golden brown and firm to the touch.

As soon as the gingerbread is done baking, cut along all the pre-cut lines (they will be faint, since the gingerbread puffed a little while baking). Cool completely. Remove the pieces from the pan and store on a tray, loosely covered with a towel, at room temperature.

building:
Adhere shapes together with sugar caramel: melt sugar over medium head until runny, and then dip the ends/edges of gingerbread into the caramel and then to each other. OR, use royal icing (or so they say — I haven’t tried it). To adhere fondant to gingerbread, use piping gel. To adhere gingerbread to foil base, use sugar caramel, and lots of it.

This same time, years previous: after two years, show and tell, the quotidian (10.12.20), the relief sale doughnuts of 2019, English muffins, the relief sale doughnuts of 2017, home, roasted red pepper soup, old-fashioned brown sugar cookies.

I knew I wanted to make a novelty cake for my husband’s fiftieth. I’ve made each of the kids a special cake — a snake, a snowboarder mountain, a chicken, and three shining dragon eggs — so it was my husband’s turn. But what to make? Everything I could think of was either too simple (a hammer, saws, ladders) or too complex (a pickup, a house) or too generic (a hat, work boots).

About a month or so before his birthday, I mentioned my cake dilemma to my mom. “And I don’t know what to get for him, either,” I said. “The things he really wants, like to get his barn finished, are too expensive.”

And then my mom said, “Oh, we’re gonna be giving an early inheritance to each of you kids. Let me check with your dad and see if we could do that now.”

Long story short: without telling my husband, I made an executive decision to put our early inheritance toward a barn, and once that decision was made, I knew exactly what the cake needed to be.

But first! To fully understand this cake, you need to know the backstory.

About thirteen years ago, my husband started building a new barn inside the existing structure.

²⁰¹⁰

He poured a concrete floor and framed up the walls. He built stairs leading to a second story, installed windows and doors, and sided the outside, all within the old structure, like a Russian nesting doll. And then we ran out of money.

The main thing that remains to be done is tear down the original barn’s ratty aluminum siding, tear off the old roof, raise the second story, and slap a roof on the whole thing.

²⁰²³

So obviously, I needed to build him a cake of his new barn emerging from the old one.  

And then I hatched an idea for the third part of his present: plans to actually get the barn done via a work day birthday celebration. I contacted the organizer for the carpenter’s guild my husband’s been a member of for years — a group of carpenters that volunteers one day a month to do projects for each other as well, as community individuals and nonprofits — and asked if it might be possible to schedule a barn raising. Great idea, the coordinator said, so I emailed him an invitation to include in his email to the guild which, at my request, would be scheduled to be sent out at 7:00pm on Sunday night, the night we’d be celebrating my husband’s birthday.

What most stressed me about the cake was that I didn’t know what I was doing.

I had hoped to find a detailed template or tutorial that I could use as a guide, but nope. I couldn’t find any cakes that were barns or construction projects or just buildings in general (aside from gingerbread houses and kids’ cartoon-ish barns). I did find some tutorials on making fondant aluminum siding and wood, but that was it. I tried to think of everything I might need and sketch it out as well as I could, but I knew I’d be figuring things out in the moment, adapting and changing and creating as I went. 

I baked three sheet carrot cakes and ordered silver luster dust, edible glaze spray, and brown matte powder. My older son took the barn’s measurements and texted them to me. I made a double batch of fondant and a batch of Italian meringue buttercream and a double batch of cream cheese frosting. I found a gingerbread recipe that was touted for being sufficiently sturdy for construction projects (more on this later) and made a couple batches. I found instructions for using sugar caramel as glue, and last minute I made a batch of piping gel for adhering fondant to fondant. I ran calculations, called my dad to have him check my numbers, made templates, baked the gingerbread, discovered mistakes, and then made a whole new set of templates (and gingerbread) all over again. 

And then it was time, ready or not, to start construction. Saturday morning, I kicked my husband out of the house and worked straight through until evening, barely pausing to eat (and we wouldn’t have had supper if it hadn’t been for my younger daughter stepping in and fixing a pot of spaghetti). 

^{photo credit: my younger daughter}

the sliding door entrance to the garage section

Sunday, I worked on the cake some more, finishing up the wooden siding and adding more torn aluminum, and photographing the final cake while there was daylight.

The birthday evening was a highly choreographed affair. Once all the kids had arrived, I released my husband from his upstairs bedroom chamber banishment and the party started.

“Your present’s in the truck,” the kids told him. They’d gone together to get my husband a second-hand bed slide for his truck, my older son fixed it up, and then Sunday afternoon he’d borrowed the truck (under the pretext of needing to haul something) and he and my older daughter had installed it. My husband opened the truck and there, at the very back, was a bag of pistachios. Oh, and the sliding bed to pull them out on, ha!

My parents joined us halfway through our meal of Costco pizza, veggies, and rootbeer, and then my brother’s family showed up on the doorstep, caroling their happy birthday greetings. And then at 6:45pm . . . drumroll . . . the cake!

^{photo credit: my older daughter}

After much oohing and aahing and photographing and discussing, I began pouring the coffee, but I didn’t want to cut into the cake just yet — there was more cake-related fun to be had and I wanted to savor my creation for a wee bit longer — so I told everyone to hang on just a minute. 

At about five minutes before seven, I handed him his gift: a big box with the inheritance check inside. When my husband saw it, he had to sit down. Literally. We all waited quietly as he collected himself, slowly pieced things together, and then collected himself again.

“One more thing,” I said. “You have email on your phone, right? Pull it up.” 

“Nothing’s here,” he said, utterly bewildered.

“It’s 6:59,” the kids pointed out, so we had a countdown, but at 7:00, still no email. “If the email went out at 7:00,” my dad said, “it might take a minute to arrive.” So my husband began serving up slides of barn while my older son obsessively hit refresh on his phone.

Seconds later, the email arrived. My husband read it, once again turning speechless and teary while we all waited quietly. And then he handed the phone to me and I, also unable to read it, handed it to my older son read it out loud.

^{photo credit: my younger son}

^{photo credit: my younger son}

That evening after everyone left, we sat together on the couch — me giddy with relief and my husband still shell-shocked and stunned — and I gave him the rundown of all the goings-on of the last few weeks. I showed him the burn on my finger from the hot caramel. I expounded on the many difficulties of building a barn from cake: I built knee walls! I even sided the back of the barn that isn’t visible! Measuring is hard! I told him about all the sent-and-then-quickly-deleted emails so he wouldn’t be able to find them, and I showed him the text our older son had written with disappearing ink. 

He was full of wonderment and questions. When did you know…? How long ago…? Who did…? 

“I had no idea,” he said, shaking his head. “No idea at all.”

^{photo credit: my younger daughter}

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (10.10.22), mushroom salt, Belper Knolle, fig walnut biscotti, khachapuri, if you ask a puerto rican to make a pincho, the quotidian (10.10.17), happy birthday, sweetie!, the boarder, contradictions and cream, clouds.

Quotidian: daily, usual or customary;
everyday; ordinary; commonplace

They made me a cake with pigs and cows!

Grape juice with seltzer: best eaten on the deck with fat, crunchy, sourdough pretzels.

An abomination: how my kids eat their mac and cheese.

Back at it.

We kept running out of mayonnaise so I bought a gallon of it.

My bubbling babies: rhubarb-red raspberry, grape, sour cherry.

Dough dump.

It’s wool sock weather: both my soles and my soul are happy.

I found a stick. Will you throw it to me, please?
^{photo credit: my younger son}

This same time, years previous: sunflowers, the quotidian (10.2.18), a different angle, the soirée of 2014, a lesson I’d rather skip, the quotidian (10.1.12), because reading books is dangerous, Sunday cozy.