First of all: the gingerbread house was COMPLETED! And glorious it was, despite a couple of misfortunes and a could-have-been-fatal-but-instead-I-pulled-it-together-by-the-skin-of-my-ass mistake.
I think I did mention that I was concerned that the gingerbread was over-leavened/not hard enough. I did end up tossing it back in the oven super-quickly while I roasted the squash for that SK chickpea salad (mmm!) It hardened up all nicely after that and having been left overnight.
The next day came the moment (well, several hours, really) of truth (and calories): the assembly. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it came together, save for a few instances of slightly uneven walls -- but that's what extra royal icing is for.
The biggest issue was when, in the mess of re-baking and so forth, I got two almost-identical-but-critically-different pieces mixed up and damn near blew the whole project by doing so. Luckily I noticed immediately before I was about to plaster the "wrong" piece with icing and M&Ms, thus saving me from significant self-harm.
In between doing all this I ate SO much royal icing, sprinkle-covered chocolate discs, M&Ms... you get the picture... that I was literally twitching with sugar-high until quite early in the morning when I literally FELT my blood sugar drop precipitously. bedtime.
Did I mention that not only do chocolate-covered sunflower seeds make great Christmas lights, but they are friggin' delicious? Just like peanut M&Ms, flavour-wise, but tiny and fantaaaastic.
So the thing went together without a major hitch ("major" being something like full collapse, or implosion, or falling off the table or something.)
Final day: Christmas Eve morning, the most fiddly part -- the roof -- came together, albeit a bit lopsidedly due to my earlier piece mixup, and somehow, due largely to some divine power's overseeing grace, it stayed on and stayed a house!
Add a little gingerbread Babcia in front and TA DA. Accolades! Man, was I proud.
Wigilia involved an enormous pile of fish -- four HUGE sides of beautiful salmon, which all ended up unfortunately overcooking because it's honestly impossible to coordinate cooking, holding, and reheating five full steam trays and several more smaller containers in ONE domestic oven.
It was good, though, despite everything. I could eat kapusta pierogi all day and never, ever get bored of them. Speaking of which, I think making some might be in order...
We got a BUNCH of junk food and ate lots of it on the road Christmas morning -- but not before we'd stuffed ourselves with peameal. Had about a pound and a half and I elected to roast it, which I'd never tried before: took about 35 or 40 minutes at 350, plus resting, which was a little more than I'd anticipated but man was it juicy -- even after ten minutes chillin' in foil it still ran delicious pork juice everywhere. Ate the whole thing between the two of us. Mmmm.
Christmas in Ottawa involved far less kapusta than I had hoped, but turkey was good. Next morning was a ciabatta-and-smoked-salmon gorgefest -- and THEN, further gorging -- I chose that day as the day of all days to not care about how many calories I ate. Literally ate most of a pound of chocolate, plus wasabi peanuts! Trail mix! Cheese spread! Jelly Bellies! I could go on and on!
I'm up five pounds since the day before Christmas but I couldn't care less.
No comments:
Post a Comment