Dodo’s Gingerbread Houses
My mother, Olga Forstrom, and I used to make the dough for Gingerbread Houses from her Swedish pepperkakker recipe. The recipe below is copied from a card written in her handwriting in 1966.
by Dora Cox
Olga Forstom’s Pepperkakker
Pepperkakker we made for gingerbread houses—1966—Scarsdale, New York.
Using brown paper grocery bags, draw and cut out pattern for gingerbread house panels:
1) Rectangular front of house with cutouts for a door and window
2) Rectangular back of house with cutout for a window
3) 2 square sides of house
4) 2 rectangular panels to form a peaked roof
5) 4 chimney panels (two with a V at the bottom) to create a chimney that rests atop the peaked roof
In a saucepan, mix 1 cup butter, 1 cup brown sugar, 1 t. molasses, 2 t corn syrup, a little orange rind, 1 T cinnamon, ½ t allspice, ½ t ginger. Boil a minute or two. Mix 1 t baking soda in dollop of sour cream or ounce of hot water, then add to mixture. Let cool for 20 minutes. Add either 2 egg yokes or 1 whole egg and stir. Add 2 to 2 ½ cups flour. Mix and let stand overnight in the fridge.
Roll out dough and place patterns on top. Use sharp knife to cut each house section. Place on clean, dry cookie sheets. Bake at 375◦ for 7 to 10 minutes.
Carmelize white sugar in a heavy iron frying pan till it melts. While it’s hot and runny, use it as glue to hold the sections of the house together. When cool, decorate your house with icing and candies in your own creative way.
This makes 6 batches of dough, which makes 9 gingerbread houses.
If you’re interested in a story about the way we used to make gingerbread houses, it follows below. Otherwise, just scroll through to the next recipe!
Dodo’s Gingerbread Houses
My husband does the grocery shopping—I don’t even have to give him a list. On the rare occasion that I accompany him, I check out what’s new—I just browse. A brown bag of cookies caught my eye—the small print said “Murray’s Old-Fashioned Gingersnaps.” It took me back to my childhood a good 75 years ago, and to one of my favourite childhood playmates, my cousin Evie Fahlgren.
Evie was exactly 2 years older than I. She was born April 12, 1920, and I was born on the same day in 1922. She lived over the hill from our house, just down Pearson Street from my grandmother Mormor Pearson’s in Kenora, Ontario.
Evie and I used to walk uptown to the post office and then to the butcher shop to get the meat that her mother, Therese, wanted for dinner. Oscar LaMay, the butcher, would wrap up the meat for us, and then Evie would say, “And 10 cents worth of gingersnaps, please.” We would munch on them all the way home.
The other treat I remember getting was a bottle of Orange Whistle with two straws. We would sit on the veranda of the Norman Hotel, sipping our bottle of orange pop. In Canada, it isn’t called soda, it’s “pop.”
My grandmother made a drink for us children at Christmas that was delicious, called “drikka” in Swedish. And every Christmas, all the Swedish ladies made pepperkakka, Swedish gingersnaps. These gingersnaps were bigger and thinner than the commercial ones we would buy. Each Christmas, every lady made at least 10 kinds of cookies. Then they’d call each other and ask, “Did you make your Ten Kinds?”
My mother would start baking her cookies early in December and put them in gift boxes she had saved. My mother was a great recycler of many different before anyone had ever heard the word ‘recycling.” She lay the cookies on tissue in the boxes, covered them with the paper, and then put them out onto the back porch, where they froze. Also on the porch was a large, grey wooden chest where we would freeze our beef, pork and venison. Of course, in those days, there were no freezers or freezer compartments in refrigerators. In wintertime, our back porch was our freezer.
Years later, after I was married and learned to cook and bake, I started making Ten Kinds of cookies for Christmas, including pepperkakker. My Canadian neighbour, Sergine, whom I called Teddy, invited me over one year to make gingerbread houses with our children. On brown paper grocery bags, we drew and then cut out panels for the houses. The boys were more interested in wrestling than baking, and Irene was just a baby crawling under our feet, but we finally succeeded in making a house for each of us. We then quickly made a dinner for when our husbands arrived from their jobs in Manhattan. Fifty years later, Teddy and her husband Julian live in Vermont and we are still close friends.
Every December, my children were eager to get the decorations from the attic and trim the tree before Christmas. But after the holidays, it was difficult to get any helpers to take down the decorations and put Christmas back in the attic. So I introduced a new family tradition. Each Christmas, after taking the decorations down and carrying them to the attic, only then could we break up the gingerbread house and eat it. We used the wooden meat tenderizer mallet with a serrated edge to smash the house into pieces. 50 years later, I gave the president of my writer’s guild in Litchfield, Connecticut, this mallet to use as a gavel to call our meetings to order.
I continued making gingerbread houses every Christmas, and gradually I began making multiple houses to use as Christmas gifts. Every Halloween, the children went out wearing their homemade costumes and carrying a pillowcase for candy. When they got home, we let them eat as much candy as they wanted that night. Then I collected the pillowcases and put the rest of the candy in the freezer.
In December, I found it was easier to make the gingerbread houses when the kids were in school. The dough was very thin and fragile. The carmelized sugar I used to glue the houses together was very hot, certainly too dangerous for kids to be near. Pretty soon the dining-room table would be covered with brown houses.
We invited neighbours’ children to help decorate each house. Royal icing was used to make the Hallowe’en candy stick to the house, and candy corn made colourful shingles for the roof. Each child would leave with a stomach full of candy and a house under their arm for their family.
When Irene was a senior Girl Scout and her troop was trying to raise money for their senior trip, I volunteered to make gingerbread houses for them to sell. One day after school, they all came over, where they sat around the dining-room table chatting and giggling and decorating the houses with candy. By this time, I had to buy the candy, because the kids didn’t go trick-or-treating anymore. When the gingerbread houses were all decorated and ready to go, I discovered that the girls had lost their girl-scout-cookie enthusiasm. They were reluctant to knock on doors with gingerbread houses in hand. Teenagers!
I took a house down to the office of Julia B. Fee, the leading realtor in Scarsdale Village. I asked Julia herself if I could put a gingerbread house in her window with a little recipe card saying that these houses were for sale to benefit the Girl Scouts. The card would say, “Just call GReenleaf 2-4256 and ask for Dora.” Julia said she would bring my request to her next board meeting, but did feel that if she allowed the Girl Scouts to use her window, every organization in town would ask for the same privilege. I left with my house under my arm. I vowed to myself that if we were ever to ever our house in Scarsdale, I wouldn’t be listing it with Julia B. Fee.
Around the corner was another realtor, new in town. When I came in, they were very courteous and asked me, “How may we help you?”
I said, “I have a house for sale. Would you be willing to help me sell it?”
They said they certainly would. “Is it in Scarsdale?” they asked.
I told them it was a very small house, but yes, it was in Scarsdale—you know, location, location, location. They said that of course they would love to have an exclusive, and I agreed.
They got out the paperwork and asked me exactly where in Scarsdale it was located. I said, “It’s in our car—I’ll be right back” and I rushed out to the curb. When I brought it in, we all burst out laughing. Fortunately, they had a good sense of humour, and they put the house and recipe card in their window.
The houses all sold and my dining-room table was cleared. I don’t think I ever made a gingerbread house again. My daughter-in-law took over the task with our grandchildren, and I rarely bake anything anymore.
