The Great Gingerbread Disaster (and the Sweet Save)

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Before I get to the epic tale, with its ups and downs, warnings, and eventually happy ending, let me give you a little background. At heart I have always loved rules: processes, catch phrases, figuring out who, what, and why they were made, and of course sometimes whether or not I thought they applied to me! So many, many, many, many, more than 30 years ago when I met my soon-to-be military husband, BOOM! I was introduced to a ton of new rules, processes, acronyms, and catch phrases to play with! I set about figuring it all out and mixed them with some of mine. I learned the lingo, the military phonetic alphabet, started using the 24-hour clock, and could identify all the helicopters that flew over our house near base by sound. When we raised our children, we passed all this on of course! Everyone in the family knows that “Call Time” (in my world) means you had better show up at the right place, fully dressed and ready to do the thing. “AIS,” first introduced to us by Everybody Loves Raymond, means if your ass is not in the seat by a specific time, the seat leaves without you. And then there’s “Time on Target” or “ETD”, straight from the Army playbook. There are many others, but the one I am going to talk about now is probably the most loved, used, needed, and important: “NO PLAN SURVIVES FIRST CONTACT.” We have taken it into our hearts to mean that the best-laid plans always need backup! Contact can mean so many things: new and unexpected interactions, weather, flat tires, tears in the time-space continuum! The goal is to have a plan and if not a plan, then at least the willingness to pivot, go with the flow, or retreat if needed.

HOW THE COOKIE TRADITION BEGAN

My mom and I, far from our friends and family in California, had the idea to send everyone Christmas cookies one year, in the way-back machine around 1997! That first year, I baked during my time off, she cleaned, we didn’t have an extra freezer, and the cost of shipping almost stopped our hearts! But we kept it up, we got more efficient, discovered flat-rate boxes, and dreamed of when we could hand-deliver cookies to everyone back home. It grew into full-blown cookie madness, still delivered to friends and family every year, and now involves a team of friends decorating upwards of 700 gingerbread cookies. This, my friends, is where the story takes a turn!

THE TAHOE DECORATING PLAN

My dear friend Patricia and now assistant and lead decorator for many of my projects lives in Tahoe, CA. It is a perfect place for mass cookie decorating. She has lots of room, my crazy food-snatching dog can stay home, and the weather’s dry! Really dry! This helps large, flooded cookies dry faster so they’re ready for their second layers of décor or to be bagged up for gifting. Whenever we can, we make her house our decorating headquarters. So, we pack up all the cookies, the sprinkles, the piping bags, the stickers, frosting ingredients, etc., and drive 3.5 hours from my house up the mountain to her house. This year we were so organized! Patricia, down the hill for work, was able to take a load of carefully organized supplies up the hill a week before Go time. I ordered some extra supplies.

On Thanksgiving Day, while I was enjoying an early dinner with my mother-in-law, Patricia was busy transforming her dining room into a beautiful Santa’s workshop and starting to sift about 12 pounds (!) of powdered sugar in preparation for cookie decorating. We arrived by Thursday afternoon, more cookie-factory friends joined us, and we set everything up so that Friday morning would be ready-set-cookie-decorating bliss! I always start with the big tree –– it’s fully flooded, packed with details, and gives me a real sense of accomplishment once all 30 are done. Patricia starts with the medium tree for the same reason. And Sarah, thank goodness, knocks out the adorable but lightly frosted, squirrel and dachshund.

WHEN THINGS START GOING WONKY

Normally in Tahoe, the cookie icing would be dry in 3 to 4 hours, but they seemed to be taking a bit longer this year. It was cold, the mixer was different, but we drove on. By late afternoon we started to see a few more issues and the icing was still not drying as expected. Gail, master of bagging and stickering, had not been able to get far. Finally, around 2200, I began a frantic Google search: What could be wrong? One by one I checked off the list of possibilities: humid, no; too much water, no; not mixed long enough, I don’t think so; too long, nope; wait … bad meringue powder maybe? So, I gathered the containers and sure enough! What I quickly ordered (while multi-tasking, and prepping for another project, and you know, living) was NOT meringue powder but royal icing mix!!! What, you ask, is royal icing mix? Well, as it turns out, it is the most expensive, excessively over-packaged powdered sugar with just enough meringue powder in it to make 2 CUPS of royal icing! 2 CUPS!!! So, we decorated all day with basically cinnamon-bun icing!!

RECOVERY, RESCUE, AND A HAPPY ENDING

Okay, the recovery process: apologies for ordering the wrong thing, apologies for not noticing, no yelling, no crying (almost), and an all-call meeting! What should we do? Dump everything? I did float this idea, but cooler heads and another beat of thinking … Okay, it is really dry up here so the cookies, after 12 hours, are almost dry; leave them overnight with a low fan on them. The frosting for the rest of the cookies? Many hands make light work! Empty all the icing bags back into the icing tubs, clean all the couplers and tips, stir meringue powder into each color (after some very loose math), smear a swatch of each on a piece of parchment, and then go to bed with fingers crossed! By the next morning, the big trees had dried and were ready to be bagged, the swatches had successfully dried so we could refill all the bags! The polar bears, flooded in white of course, look a bit worse for wear but Jac calls them protest cookies against climate change, so there you go. The point, of course? We did not survive first contact, the best-laid plans can still go off course, but we kept calm (not really) and decorated on! Besides, no matter what the cookies look like at the end of the day we still had a full table of family, old friends, sticky fingers, laughter, and love.

GINGERBREAD RECIPE HERE!