Gingerbread

Building your own gingerbread house is no easy thing, unless you've already developed cake-decorating skills like working with paper cones full of icing and pastry bags with fancy tips. But it is an absorbing craft, and you'll be able to eat the results instead of trying to figure out how to get rid of them when you've finished. (Potters, woodworkers and needlecrafters will know what I mean.) And there is an easier way or two. If you're not sure about rolling out gobs of dough, cutting it into neat shapes and hoping they'll actually fit together, there are gingerbread house molds on the market.

Students in the gourmet-food class at Great Valley High School are creating holiday confections too pretty to eat. Gingerbread houses are encrusted with a variety of candy. Roofs are graced with Necco wafers and sliced almonds, although one student got creative with cereal and used shredded Frosted Mini-Wheats. Gumdrops and gummy bears adorn the sides. Coconut shavings are snow. Upside-down ice cream cones coated in bright green icing are evergreen trees, and marshmallows are snowmen.

No need to shovel these tiny houses out of the snow. They are part of a third annual gingerbread house exhibit displayed in West Chester storefronts through New Year's Day. Not one is your typical cottage surrounded by gumdrop trees and toothpick fences. The most elaborate this year isn't even a house, but a faithful miniature copy of a Renaissance chapel at Varese in the mountains of northern Italy. Its builders - all employees of Clemente's Ristorante on East Gay Street - say they logged about 300 hours creating the miniature domed structure, complete with tiny columns, stained glass, arched doorways, and a gingerbread roof scored with lines to resemble tiles.

Gina DiRienzi, 10, applies decorations to finish her gingerbread house. The children's gingerbread workshop Saturday was part of the Old Fashioned Christmas in Historic West Chester.

The Holiday Inn at King of Prussia has one more room this holiday season - a 7-foot tall gingerbread house that has gone up in the lobby to highlight the Toys for Tots campaign. A bin is available at the house - made of 300 pounds of gingerbread, 200 pounds of dough and 20 gallons of icing by executive chef John Gawthrop and other hotel employees - for toys through the start of the new year.

Edible edifices and confection constructions decorate Peddler's Village, which held a contest for gingerbread houses and is displaying the winners until Dec. 31. Entries came from categories including Christmas villages, Victorian houses, famous buildings, original designs, amateur creations and works by children in two age groups. Peddler's Village is at Routes 202 and 263 in Lahaska.

Home, really sweet home For years, local bakery owner Karen Rohde has been donating hand-crafted gingerbread houses to area charities. Now, you can buy Rohde's creations either pre-decorated or ready for decorating with the kids in your home.   For the chopstick-impaired This oversize paper-clip-style chopstick is perfect for adults or children who want to eat Asian food authentically, but just can't quite grasp it. A fun stocking-stuffer.  

It's the first house Jane Dobkin has ever built. Instead of bricks and mortar, though, she used flour, shortening, ginger, lots of frosting, toasted nuts, ice cream cones and chocolate. Dobkin is one of four Main Line chefs who will be among 25 from the Philadelphia area to cook up gingerbread houses for a culinary contest and benefit called "Dreams Can Come True" at The Shops at the Bellevue in Philadelphia. Judging starts at 11 a.m. today, the winners will be announced at 3 p.m. Dobkin, a pastry chef at La Fourchette in Wayne, said hers is a traditional design.

Come the holidays, Walter Deuschle would carve an ice sculpture or make a gingerbread house. For special occasions, he might create an elaborate centerpiece or table decoration. But for most of his career as a chef, food-service supervisor, and later general manager at such local country clubs as Ashbourne, Whitemarsh, and Huntingdon Valley, Mr. D, as he was known, let his creative and artistic abilities lie fallow, devoting himself instead to pleasing the palates of diners and serving the needs of club members.

Home, really sweet home For years, local bakery owner Karen Rohde has been donating hand-crafted gingerbread houses to area charities. Now, you can buy Rohde's creations either pre-decorated or ready for decorating with the kids in your home.   For the chopstick-impaired This oversize paper-clip-style chopstick is perfect for adults or children who want to eat Asian food authentically, but just can't quite grasp it. A fun stocking-stuffer.  

For an opera that has everything - an unrelentingly beautiful score, tremendous visual possibilities and an alluring story with as much modern-day social commentary as you want to read into it - H?nsel und Gretel has managed to stay away from Philadelphia for a long time. It was once standard repertoire here, yet curiously, for an opera so accessible to beginners, H?nsel und Gretel has not had a professional staging locally in more than four decades. But tomorrow night, after a long slumber, the Brothers Grimm story (with major softening)

"Is this going to be the best one yet?" asked Hannah, my 7-year-old granddaughter, as we began constructing our seventh gingerbread house. "I think so," I said. "Oh, we always say that!" said her 10-year-old sister, Breanna, laughing. Bonding with grandchildren is difficult when they live an airplane's flight away and you see them only a few times a year. After my granddaughters were born, I decided one way to create memories was to build a gingerbread house with them each Thanksgiving when I visit.

Store-bought cookies may be lovelier, crispier, chewier or more elaborate, but nothing beats homemade - unless you make them with advice from a pastry chef. So we're offering you this seasonal treat: tips from several local chefs for beautiful holiday cookies. Do try these at home - because baking does more than heat up a kitchen. It creates warmth within the family. The Snowman The bakers: Ellen Shimberg and Laura Anderson are the women behind Two Tarts Baking Co. The technique: They use a classic butter cookie, "with extra butter 'cause life's too short not to have a lot of butter," Shimberg says.

Step onto the grounds of the Mercer Museum this weekend and step back in time to an early American craft fair. More than 100 costumed crafters and demonstrators will be at the Doylestown museum for its annual Folk Fest. Among the demonstrations will be sheep- shearing, glassblowing and doll-making, to tie in with the museum's new exhibition, "Dolls From the Attic. " Children can make their own cornhusk dolls in the craft area, pet farm animals, play dress-up, and ride a mule-powered carousel.

Students in the gourmet-food class at Great Valley High School are creating holiday confections too pretty to eat. Gingerbread houses are encrusted with a variety of candy. Roofs are graced with Necco wafers and sliced almonds, although one student got creative with cereal and used shredded Frosted Mini-Wheats. Gumdrops and gummy bears adorn the sides. Coconut shavings are snow. Upside-down ice cream cones coated in bright green icing are evergreen trees, and marshmallows are snowmen.

The spicy smell of Christmas gingerbread begins wafting through Karen Aigeldinger's kitchen well before Halloween. That's her absolute deadline if she is to mold the chewy confection into a prize-worthy entry for the annual Gingerbread House Competition in Peddler's Village. Aigeldinger, a second-place winner in this year's amateur category, is among those who enter the contest each year, dazzling judges and holiday spectators with constructions of Victorian houses, historic landmarks and three-dimensional figures made entirely of edibles.

Of all the bakery treats to set the holiday mood, none does so more clearly, more universally than gingerbread cookies and the houses made of them. What better way to celebrate the season than to create or show off one of those finely crafted edible structures? Or to visit a display of miniature homes and scenes artfully crafted by others? In some cases, your approach will support a charity as well. Zach's bakery, with Lawndale and Fairmount locations, is making gingerbread A-frame chalets typical of master pastry chef Emmerich Zach's native Austria.

Gingerbread houses aren't really made of gingerbread. It would be too soft. It's not even gingerbread cookie dough. Still too soft. "The recipes are basically the same, with spices and no preservatives," baker Karen Boyd explains, "but for houses you want it a little thicker than for cookies. " That means more flour or less liquid or both. Boyd knows whereof she speaks. She not only expects to turn out more than 250 gingerbread houses for her customers this year, but also has produced another in a series of specialty display pieces in gingerbread - a replica of her Bredenbeck's bakery building.