St. Basil's Gingerbread House

Well... I think this deserves a spot here on DA... This was made for the Aldrich's gingerbread house contest (December 2005), so all you Port Townsenders should go see it! It's upstairs... Kind of sad how they put stuff up there so not everyone sees those. Mary, my Canadian boarding-school friend, helped the mass-production of stencilled walls. She cut while I baked. The walls are actually sugar cookie, not gingerbread. The domes on top are carved pound cake (GREAT for carving! Just ask Robin!), and they're capped with marzipan painted gold. The ceiling kept falling in, no matter HOW many styrofoam pillars we had... We replaced it with cardboard (psst! Don't tell!). You know how to make a cookie cyllinder? You bake a flat rectangle, then immediately wrap it around a tin can the moment it comes out of the oven. It takes a bit of practice. The icing was fun to make... It's called Royal Icing. You make it with whipped egg whites. I did have a very traumatic experience with the red icing... I ran out, and made a new batch, but I made the new batch too big and I ran out of red food dye... It came out pink, so I raided the pantry for anything with red dye. I found some red sugar sprinkles... I tried mixing them into the icing so they'd dissolve. The dye came off the sugar granules, but the actual crystals stayed whole. I then tried microwaving the icing so it would heat up and be more dissolvable. When I took the bowl out, there was a giant bubble in the middle of the icing. I opened it and inside it was dry and burned. The sugar stayed undissolved. Have you ever smelled burning sugar? The smell made ME want to puke. The icing was still pink... I still had a lot of sprinkles left over, though... So I got a little glas and poured all the sprinkles in. I put in just enough water to suck the dye out of the sugar. I filtered the dyed water into the icing. It worked! I was still traumatized by the lingering smell, though. Thank you for reading. THE END!