Fairytale Gingerbread Cottage

On Friday while David was ill in bed, Nathaniel and I started to get into the Christmas spirit.

First we read some Christmas books together.

Then we donned our aprons to start making gingerbread.

Recipe:

180g butter
125g brown sugar
300g golden syrup
500g plain flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
extra flour for rolling.

First we preheated the oven to 150 degrees.

Then we weighed out all our ingredients.

I melted the butter in a large pan over a low heat then added the sugar and syrup.

We placed all the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl and I poured over  the syrup mix and Nat gave it all a good stir.

We tipped the dough onto a floured surface and kneaded with more flour until it was a thick dough consistency.

We used a gingerbread cottage mould from Lakeland which was much easier to use than messing around with templates and cutting the individual pieces. You just tear off bits of gingerbread and squash them into the mould, pressing them down with your fingers.

Then we popped the moulds onto a large baking tray and baked for approximately 25 minutes until the gingerbread was golden brown.

We left the gingerbread to cool on a wire rack for 30 minutes by which time Seb was home from school.

I made up some Royal icing and Seb assisted me in assembling the cottage - quite a fiddly job but with his help we finally managed it.

I then piped around the windows and doors and we decorated the cottage with jelly tots, fruity tooties, dolly mixtures and snowies for roof tiles.

With the left over royal icing Nat decorated our Christmas cake.

It was a lovely day followed by my book club meal at the Little Bay restaurant on the seafront in Brighton. Unfortunately David was still not feeling well enough to join me so I caught the bus by myself.

It was so windy that as I walked down West Street my new birthday umbrella (a gift from David) blew inside out and the spokes all bent and came apart from the material so i had to abandon it and run the rest of the way to the Little Bay.

It is a wonderful little place laid out like the inside of a theatre with the tables all in private boxes  / booths with red theatre curtains and gold candelabra everywhere.  There is live opera singing on Wednesday to Saturday nights which was a really fun and novel touch.  The food was really good value and absolutely delicious. 

When I got home I caught up on the news about the school shooting in Connecticut in America where twenty small children and six teachers were gunned down.  Such an awful and hideous event - those poor families. It is so hard to contemplate or understand what on earth would lead someone to massacre little children like that - and so close to Christmas too.  I think the news will have shocked and appalled people around the world.

 Our children are so precious and it reminds me how important it is to enjoy every possible minute with them as we never know how long we will have with them.