We haven't had a lot of snow, but it has been cold enough that what we did get hasn't gone away, so technically it is a white Christmas. It's currently 14 and supposed to get to 30 today, that's a heat wave compared to the last several days. (When you have a day where the high is 5 below, that's COLD!)
The fluting got messed up on the left side, I can never seem to get fluting that looks like the ones in the cookbooks. But it tasted great.
Today I've made a cherry pie, a triple batch of pastry cream (for assembling a trifle for tomorrow), and have a big pot of chili on the stove for supper, which will also include oyster stew.
We do have Michaels stores in Lincoln, there's even one near us, and we also have a Hobby Lobby, though it is further away and I don't get there very often. JoAnne's Fabrics also has a good kitchen section.
I seem to recall on one of the baking contest shows they were doing gingerbread construction and what they did was to make full sheet pans of gingerbread and bake them about half way, then use a paper template to cut them into shapes and finish baking them so that they were solid enough for construction.
Several years ago SFBI sent out a link at Christmas to a video showing their staff constructing an eight-foot tall Christmas tree out of bread, which they then had on display in the lobby. There may still be a link to the video on their website. It was impressive!
My mother's chocolate chip cookie recipe (https://mynebraskakitchen.com/wordpress/forums/topic/oatmeal-crisps-chocolate-chip-cookies/) uses both baking powder and baking soda. They tend to rise and have a lot of internal air spaces, which makes them great for dipping in milk, but they're crisp, not chewy.
I think the sugar/fat ratio has more to do with crispness/chewiness than the leavening.
We're going to do the traditional Christmas Eve oyster stew and chili, but Christmas dinner will be steaks, mushrooms, hash brown casserole, Brussels sprouts, DGBC and trifle for dessert.
Diane made dough for mushroom cookies today, and has a couple more planned over the next two days.
I plan to make a cherry pie for Christmas Eve, and she'll make a trifle for Christmas day.
We only got an inch and a half of snow when they were forecasting up to 6, but we did get the promised double-digit sub-zero temperatures, and the high today was around -5.
Supposed to be a little warmer heading into Christmas, but possibly an ice storm Sunday evening.
There are several gingerbread house cutter sets out there, a search on Amazon finds multiples of several of them. (That's all too common these days, sellers create multiple vendors for the same products, with identical pictures, often at various price points.)
The largest of them that I saw makes a house that is about 9 inches tall at the peak.
We wound up doing a combination of lavash pizza and takeout from Valentinos Pizza.
15 => 40 is an unusually large difference in baking time.
Recipes for gingerbread cookies and recipes for gingerbread houses are different, the former are designed to be edible, the latter are designed to be sturdy, for construction.
I'm making semolina bread this evening, because we used the last of it at supper. With two more people in the house, we are going through bread a lot faster.
We wound up making spaghetti for dinner tonight.
