By Helen Williams –
The architectural wonder of the Christmas baking world is the gingerbread house. Built, frosted and fully decorated, it is a festive, colorful, attention-getting addition to any holiday table. Actually building one, however, can seem like an overwhelming task if you’ve never done your own gingerbread house before. It doesn’t have to be.
The Secret is Out
Cathy Addoms is willing to share her secrets. She is well known in Jackson County for her cooking abilities, and her gingerbread houses are beautiful and popular. Each November she demonstrates how to put them together at Walden’s Harvest Craft Festival.
Cathy has been using the same recipe for the gingerbread since she made her first one from her old Pillsbury cookbook.
“I made my first gingerbread house after we moved to Colorado in 1971,” she said. “Our kids were 8, 9 and 10 and I thought it would be fun for all of us. My mom was visiting then. I got all the stuff out, made the frosting and we started putting it together, and my mom suggested I go to my room and they would finish because I was getting pushy about how it was going to be done.”
Cathy Comes to Colorado
Cathy and her husband, Sam, moved from Denver to North Park in 2003. “I knew very little about Jackson County,” she said, “and had been here once or twice in 30 years. Sam wanted to put a teepee up; he likes teepees. We went on a road trip to find the perfect spot. This was our first stop and, for me, the last one. I’ve come to think that the Park, and Connor Creek where we live, draws who it wants.
“After we looked at this lot, we went all around the state to the back mountains, all the way down to Durango, down to Taos and back to Denver. I never wavered. At Montrose, Sam said, ‘This is a really nice place.’ I said, ‘Hah, doesn’t even get a start.’ It turned out that teepees are not allowed in the covenants at Connor Creek, so we had a house built. I’ve never regretted moving to North Park, and I’m not leaving unless I don’t know I’ve left — if I got dementia or something. It’s like being home and it’s so strange, because I’d never really been here before.”
The North Park community welcomed Sam and Cathy wholeheartedly, and not just for Cathy’s excellent cooking and baking skills. They are both community-minded and serve on various boards, while enjoying their retirement to the fullest. They have two beautiful golden retrievers, Spirit and Jackson (named for Jackson County).
Sam and Cathy are originally from Wisconsin. After Sam finished college, he went to work in a bank in Chicago. He was the Chicago banker, for Ken Monfort of Monfort Colorado’s Inc., a correspondent banker. Ken wanted a new person on his financial team at Monfort Packing. Sam said he wouldn’t be his accountant but would be vice president of finance, and eventually he became president and CEO.
The Addoms’ moved to Greeley and Sam stayed nine years at Monfort. After that, he became president of Frontier Airlines in 1992 and was due to retire October 1, 2001. After the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, he stayed another six months.
“I was 19 when Sam and I married. I knew from the time I was 17 that I wanted to marry him,” Cathy said, looking back. “I would say to myself, if I had to live the rest of my life without Sam, what would that be? And I thought, unbearable. We are very different but we are very well-matched. We’re just lucky.”
Collecting Cookie Cutters
Her cookie cutter collection started the first Christmas after they were married. “We didn’t have enough cash for more than the stand and the Christmas tree,” Cathy said, “so I bought a few cookie cutters and we decorated the tree with cookies. That started the cookie cutter collection.
“We were kitty-corner from a hardware store in Hinsdale, the Chicago suburb where we lived in an apartment in a Victorian house. I went over to the hardware store often. I didn’t know anyone and the people in stores have to talk to you. There’s hardly anything less expensive to collect than cookie cutters,” Cathy said. Today she has more than 1,000 cookie cutters in her collection.
“I have some from Hammer Song Company that are real collector’s items,” she noted. “Then my mom gave me all her cookie cutters. A friend in Arizona sent me two cookie cutters that had been a bakery’s cookie cutters, really old ones. I have one of the horse, Steamboat, from the Wyoming license plate. That’s a collectible because they don’t make them anymore, and they probably sold only a thousand. My oldest purchase was 52 years ago this Christmas.”
Cathy likes to decorate her gingerbread houses thoroughly with little Christmas trees at the corner of the house, gingerbread animals around the base, and lots of Christmas candy.
She uses some of her smaller cookie cutters and the leftover gingerbread to create some of the decorations. She frosts and decorates them before adding them to her house project. And she finds other candies and sprinkles to add.
“There’s no such thing, in my opinion, as overdoing it,” Cathy said.
Gingerbread House Recipe
Addoms’ gingerbread houses take some time, but they’re worth the while. CCL’s associate editor Donna Wallin says it’s important to follow the recipe to tee and to buy the basic ingredients – nothing fancy.
Gingerbread House Dough
1 cup sugar
1 cup solid shortening (margarine or Crisco)
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon ginger
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon allspice
2/3 cup buttermilk
1 cup molasses or honey
5 cups flour
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Do not double this recipe but it may be cut in half. Combine all the ingredients except the flour in a large mixer bowl and blend for 1 minute.
Gradually add 5 cups of flour to the mixture. Makes a firm but sticky dough. Refrigerate dough for at least 3 hours, but overnight is better.
Roll dough on a floured surface to ¼-inch thickness. Cut patterns for the house using a small pizza cutter or pastry cutter.
Bake for 8-10 minutes. Larger pieces will take longer. Cool on racks.
This recipe makes 1 large house and extra cookies or 4 small houses and cookies.
Royal Icing
6 egg whites at room temperature
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 pounds of powdered sugar
Place egg whites in large bowl of mixer and add cream of tartar. Whip to combine. When frothy add the sugar. Blend on low speed, then on high speed for 5-7 minutes or until a firm frosting forms. Store in glass or metal bowl, not plastic. Keep a damp towel over the bowl while using the frosting.
You may also use dried egg whites or meringue powder. Follow the directions on the box.
Cathy’s tips:
• Always make extra parts for the house, in case some break.
• Put similar sizes on the same sheet so they bake evenly and the smaller ones don’t overbake.
• The nice thing about the recipe is that it doesn’t have eggs in it. Ginger is a preservative like sugar, so the house will last for years. If little kids are helping, it doesn’t hurt them to eat the dough.
• Cathy uses meringue powder to make the frosting. Keep the frosting in a metal or glass bowl, then whip it again; it doesn’t have to be refrigerated. One year she froze it and it worked OK.
• It’s a good idea to have a wet cloth in hand.
• For a pastry bag, you can use a zip top bag (for children use a freezer bag, because they squeeze so hard); cut off a corner to push out the frosting.
• Use caramel where the walls join if you don’t want the line to show.
• You don’t have to be accurate, when putting cookies on the house landscaping. Just stick them wherever you want.
• Whenever you want to put something on, add a little more frosting to make it stick.
To Assemble the Gingerbread House:
• It only takes about 30 minutes to do the whole thing, once the gingerbread and frosting are prepared.
• First, frost your base — you can use a plate, a cutting board or Styrofoam (a piece of Styrofoam is best) to hold the house. Put the base on a piece of waxed paper so you can turn the house without touching it. Put frosting all over the base for snow in a thick enough layer to hold the sides of the house.
• After the walls are up, put the roof on. Some people frost the roof and some people just decorate it. Don’t press too hard. Put a lot of frosting on both edges and press lightly.
• Then start adding the decorations. Have on hand:
• All kinds of colored sprinkles.
• Cathy likes little red hots; they’re not too heavy so they don’t fall off.
• Don’t use the silver dragées; they tarnish. The gold ones don’t tarnish.
• Little M&M’s are good.
• Christmas candy of various kinds — Cathy likes the old-fashioned pinwheels.
Helen Williams is a writer from Jackson County and a member of Mountain Parks Electric.