Joanne Seelig: Welcome back, my name is Joanne Seelig and I am the Family Programs
Coordinator at the National Building Museum in Washington DC. I am
here to show you how to build and decorate a ginger bread house. If you
would like to make your own icing at home as opposed to buying it
commercially, then all you need is two egg whites, some cream of tartar
and a pound of confectioner s sugar which is also called powdered sugar.
The first thing I am going to do is crack out the egg and separates the egg
yolk. So, only the egg whites go into the bowl.
What I do is pass the yolk back and forth so that the white drips out. Next
egg and I am ready for the confectioner s sugar. Just going to dump it all
in and last but not least, a half teaspoon of the cream of tartar, once all of
your ingredients are in the bowl, I would suggest using an electric beater
to mix it up all together. You are going to continue to beat these
ingredients for seven minutes and seven minutes later, you have your royal
icing.
Now, before you are ready to start you are going to need your gingerbread
pieces. We like to buy our gingerbread fresh from Clement s Bakery in
Maryland. It is three-fourth of an inch thick and it is cooled and dried. You
may wish the baker on at home and there is a lot of recipes and cook
books in online. If you would like to do that on your own, what I would
suggest doing is baking four sheets of gingerbread in your oven. Once you
have the sheets of gingerbread you are going to want to cut out the
appropriate shape to make your house. We use two triangles and two
rectangles as the template for our house. What I would suggest doing is
cutting out cardboard templates, so, you can cut out the gingerbread
pieces.
Our rectangle is 12 inches by 8 inches and then we use a triangle of a
height of 10 inches. Once you have those I will also suggest grabbing a
cardboard base or you can use a tray, but this important because it is going
to serve as the floor to your house. The piece that I am going to use today
is 14 by 10. Now, that you have all of your pieces and your icing, you are
ready to build.