With the holiday season in full swing, I find myself in the mood to do some baking, which is a rare occurrence because for me anything involving sugar, flour and eggs usually equals frustration and disaster.
I decided to be brave, going old-school and trying my hand at gingerbread, which has quite a history behind it. Gingerbread was originally brought to Europe by an Armenian monk in 992 A.D., who taught Gingerbread cooking to French priests and Christians. In the 13th century, it made it’s way to Sweden by way of German immigrants. Swedish nuns baked gingerbread to serve as a digestive aid. It then became customary to paint gingerbread biscuits and use them as window hangings, signaling the beginning of gingerbread being displayed for holiday decorations. Gingerbread man cookies first appeared in the 16th century: Elisabeth I of England had her bakers make gingerbread figures in the likenesses of her important guests.
Visit Smithville, Texas, to see a monument dedicated to honoring the world’s largest gingerbread man, which was over 20 feet long and weighed in at over 1300 pounds! The monument itself is made out of the cookie sheet with which they used to create the gargantuan thing. What kind of oven do you think they used?
Gingerbread houses were thought to have been created in Germany and decorated with candies to represent the witch’s house in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. What a creepy cannibalistic sorceress has to do with Christmas decorating, I have no idea (the Germans are an odd lot).
The tediousness of stamping out dozens of tiny gingerbread men or constructing a dwelling out of cookies and frosting does not appeal to me, however, so using an adaptation of Martha Stewart’s chocolate gingerbread bars recipe I came up with a quick and easy way to get your gingerbread fix without all the fuss. The earthy, almost licorice-like flavor of the molasses with the pungent ginger and rich chocolate, along with the tangy, bright lemon and cream cheese will surely please your holiday guests.
This article appears in Dec 16-22, 2010.