Happy Halloween (Haunted Cookie House)

Perhaps the title of this post should actually be “Proof that things don’t always go the way I had planned.”

Last week I got the sudden inspiration to decorate a haunted gingerbread house. I think I might have spotted a haunted house kit in a kitchen catalog or something, and it made me determined to make my own.  Crazy things like that happen in my kitchen a lot.

I spent a while researching haunted house pictures online and developed the pattern for my house.  While it was not as elaborate as some I have seen, I think it was a step up from the gingerbread house I decorated last Christmas.

I didn’t want to do gingerbread, though… While I love the rustic brown color of gingerbread for Christmas, it’s not really the color that comes to mind when I think of Halloween.  Instead, I used my standard sugar cookie recipe but added quite a bit of dark cocoa powder to give a greyish black/brown color.  (I also left out the baking powder so that the cookies wouldn’t rise/spread at all… I didn’t plan on eating them anyway). The color turned out perfectly.

To go along with the greyish brown/black color of the house, I used the same dark cocoa powder to color the royal icing I used to asemble the house.  I added a bit of black gel food coloring to adjust the color a bit so that the icing on the seams of the house would match the color of the cookies.  I thought it would also make a great background color for the windows and doors.

All was going well until I decided that it would be better to pipe all of the windows, doors, and other decorations for the house onto waxed paper instead of directly onto the cookies that I was using to assemble the house.  It seemed like a good idea in theory… I was afraid that some of the pieces might break while I was trying to assemble the house (and a few did!) and I didn’t want to mess up the decorations in the process.

The only problem was that the decorations that I piped on the waxed paper never dried correctly (after drying for almost 24 hours).  I was able to salvage a few to decorate the house, but most of them just ended up in a big sticky mess.

I also learned a few other things in the process…  There’s a reason why I prefer cookies to cakes.  It’s much easier to pipe on a flat surface than on the side of a haunted house.  And, though I’m not great at it, I love old-school piping. I could have added string-work to everything, but tried to edit my impulses and just added it to the roof.

All things considered, it was a fun project and I had a good time decorating, even if the end result wasn’t quite what I had planned.  After all, this was really just practice for the giant gingerbread house I am planning for Christmas… But, you knew that, right?!