A quick post mortem on Gingerbread Incident 2020: I attempted to make the frosting, and I had to guesstimate what a third of a pound of powdered sugar was in cups, based on serving size. Then I broke the yolk while separating out the egg white and had to use apple cider vinegar when it turned out that the only white vinegar in the house was about a decade old and had spent most of its time in the laundry room for stripping out soap residue.
It didn't fully stiffen when I used the electric mixer, but I figured I had just forgotten the way the frosting was supposed to look. I hadn't looked at it for over twenty years, after all. On to the frosting decorating! It turned out that someone had stepped on the decorating set, so the tips were squashed and the thing to attach them to the tube was no longer usable. I managed to rig together a solution using a zippy bag and one of the tips from the cookie press that I use for filling devilled eggs, and we were back in business, albeit rather messily.
Now, I ran a line of frosting on the top of the roof to fill in the gap and start dealing with the issues. The frosting fell through the cracks. The snowbanks I created to hide the place where I had melted-sugar glued the boys to the foil turned into puddles. I frantically added a half-cup more powdered sugar to the frosting and ran the electric mixer some more. It wasn't making any difference. This is when I burst into frustrated tears and went back to bed in hysterics. The last thing I heard before drifting off was Fuzzy telling Kiddo that they had to make it look nice so I didn't feel so much like a failure.
When I woke up, they proudly showed me their results. It turns out that the frosting stiffens a bit when you wait a few minutes (ahem. Not mentioned in the recipe.), and they were able to work with it then. To be fair, a world in which my mother was able to simply make the frosting and immediately load it into the baggie (I learned that trick young, folks) didn't exist until the late 1990s. I have to assume she always had to stop to answer the phone or convince one of us that using up the last roll of scotch tape to make a wad of sticky plastic was not, in fact, art, and would not be appreciated by the lady who would then have to glue wrapping paper around boxes that night. By the time she actually got back to the frosting, it would be ready to work with her. I was doomed by my family's willingness to let me focus.
It turned out pretty cute. I'm pretty sure more candy went into Kiddo and Fuzzy than onto the house, but they had a good time, which is the point. I'm sure I'll do better next year, partially because my mother will be here to exhibit her mastery of the gingerbread medium, which is pretty epic.
Fuzzy is showing Kiddo the video to "Last Christmas" on YouTube right now. There is so much fluffy hair in this thing. Merry Christmas to all.
It's beautiful!
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