The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

This has been a big year for our little family. In March we decided to pack our belongings, put it in storage and cross our fingers that our first home would sell in the less-than-stellar market.
You see, we left our hearts in Seattle. We met here, fell in love here, ate incredibly perfect food here and found our church here. We had been gone for 5 years and decided this was the year to return.
In September we sat in our new home in Seattle. It was empty. Devoid of the family photos that now hang in the hall, free from the paintings that have been placed on many walls since their creation. There was no couch to eat popcorn and watch movies on and no sugar in the pantry to bake cookies with. Yet it felt like home.
When the daring bakers challenged us to make a gingerbread house, I wanted to celebrate this year and our new change by constructing a gingerbread “townhouse”. Our townhouse.
You see we live in a vertical rectangle. Three petite floors and beautiful floor to ceiling windows that allow what little light we have this time of year to pour in.
This is our actual townhouse.

And here is our townhouse made of gingerbread, royal icing and candy.

While I love that our actual townhouse doesn’t melt in the rain I do think it would be quite fun to live in the cookie version of our house. I have no doubts that the boys agree with me.

Our original townhouse is constructed from wood and nails. My townhouse is constructed from gingerbread dough, royal icing, peppermint pillows, chocolate covered sunflower seeds, dragees, nonpareils and sanding sugar.

This will probably be the last time I talk to you before Christmas so let me just first of all thank you. This blogged has changed drastically this year and has become something entirely different for me. Where it was once a place to show and market my dessert catering and wedding cake business it has now become a place of creativity and sanctity. A place where I am free to create, share and commune with all of you.

Thank you for welcoming these changes and supporting me. I feel so incredibly blessed to have found an encouraging community during a time in my life where there has been much change and little sleep.

Secondly I want to wish you a joyous holiday filled with much love and sugar. May you be abundantly blessed in this season with hearts and bellies full.

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The Food: A-Z Project is still going strong! Check out our flickr group and if you haven’t joined please do. Tomorrow we are moving on to the letter “H”.

For those of you unfamiliar with the project please let me explain. Seeking inspiration and some discipline I decided to begin a group that photographs a food item or recipe beginning with the letter in the alphabet corresponding to the week we are on. With this project I hope to see an improvement in my photography skills and become more familiar with a variety of food ingredients and dishes.

Of course there have been a few weeks in there where I simply scanned through images I have previously shot and hoped I could find some that start with the right letter. But when I push myself to shoot something intentionally that’s when I learn the most and am most satisfied.

Last week was “G” (moving on to “H” next week) and feeling particularly inspired thanks to an incredible workshop with Penny de los Santos, I set up my shot.

Using Grendadine as my “G” ingredient I made a cocktail called the Gin and Sin – which I think earns me extra points for using the letter “G” twice.

This festive cocktail is a wonderful way to bring even more cheer to this joyous time of year. Slightly sweet and sour and completely refreshing. I can’t help but think that the sparkling cranberries from Heidi at 101 cookbooks would look lovely floating on the surface.

See how much fun our flickr group is? Sipping cocktails while taking photos – join the party!

Gin and Sin

1 1/2 oz gin
1 oz orange juice
1 oz lemon juice
1/2 tsp grenadine syrup

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