The Christmas Castle

So I know it’s a little early, but John and I decided to make gingerbread houses for our date night last weekend.

Then John decided he wanted to make a gingerbread Washington DC temple.

Not to be outdone (I’m a pastry chef, for crying out loud!), I then decided to make a gingerbread castle.

But then we realized that we would not have enough gingerbread dough to make both. And John hadn’t exactly planned out the specifics of making a temple of gingerbread. So we made a castle.

The original plans called for towers at each corner. But there still wasn’t enough dough for that, so it got one tower. On the inside. We’re making multiple batches of this stuff next year for all of our architectural plans. ;)

I had some really old royal icing that I hadn’t thrown out yet (but needed to…) and since I figured we wouldn’t be eating our castle I used that to pipe the brickwork. But it was really runny…so it’s not my best piping. But hey, it’s a medieval castle and their bricks were not perfect either. ;)
Instead of using icing to build the structure, we made a caramel syrup for the glue and it was amazing! It hardens very quickly and is really sturdy. We’ll be doing that again next year for sure.

All we had for decorating was the Halloween candy I’d gotten on clearance. So I put some sweet tart skulls and bones in our tower dungeon. You know…because we could…
And we used laffy taffy to make the wreath. Which I don’t recommend. It wasn’t very stable and by the next morning, it looked like this (should have dipped the whole back in caramel, rather than just the top and bottom…):

Oh well. You live and learn. Just wait till next year!