Once again, it’s the Christmas-holiday-yuletide time of year — and here at New England Innkeeper headquarters, that means absolutely everything around us is covered in a thin layer of flour, confectioners’ sugar, and sticky molasses. After all, ’tis the season for creating our annual gingerbread house!
We decided to go a little bit bigger this year and do a custom gingerbread house design inspired by the landmark Historic Thompson Farmhouse (1750) located just outside of Perkins Cove on Shore Road in Ogunquit, Maine!
Why did we choose the Historic Thompson Farmhouse (1750), Ogunquit, Maine as the model for our 2020 Gingerbread House?
This is a quintessential old New England home, located directly across from Ogunquit’s romantic Hartwell House Inn, that has been part of the charming visual landscape of Ogunquit for hundreds of years! It also happens to be the place we’ve lived for almost a decade – so that added a fun measure of personal significance to the project!
This personal significance is what spurred us to include some of the intricate details on this gingerbread house – like the wreaths we’ve been known to hang + the candles in the front windows — including the single True Bayberry Wax candle in the middle front window.
We have a long-standing tradition, as many New Englanders do, of burning a Real Bayberry Wax candle to the nub on every Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. These beautiful and clean-burning candles are made from the wax on the berries of the bayberry shrub and have been the traditional holiday candle since colonial times. Burning Bayberry Candles on these winter holidays is a practice that has long been associated with bringing blessings of abundance in the coming year!
Click Play Below To View A Video Depicting The Construction Of The 2020 New England Innkeeper Gingerbread House (created by Charlene + Eric Taubert) – Inspired by the Historic Thompson Farmhouse of Ogunquit, Maine:
Want to learn how to make your own Gingerbread House? Here’s where to start!
It’s important to understand, making a gingerbread house from scratch is a multi-day process.
Between gathering the ingredients, preparing the patterns, mixing the gingerbread dough, chilling the dough, rolling out the dough, cooking the dough, trimming the dough, hardening the cooked slabs, creating the “stained glass” windows out of hard candies, mixing the royal icing, decorating the dough slabs, assembling the structure (in multiple steps), and adding (plus fine-tuning) the embellishments! It takes a lot more effort than is often depicted by the innkeeper or baker in your favorite Hallmark Christmas movie! But it’s still a lot of fun!
Plan to make a holiday project of it with your family! And be sure to use our list of “20 of the BEST Lesser-Known Christmas Movies” to fill your downtime in a festive manner while you wait for your gingerbread dough to chill and harden!
Where do I get a good recipe? We continue to use, as our foundation, the recipes and procedures outlined in the excellent New York Times “How To Make A Gingerbread House” Cooking Guide by Julia Moskin. While we’ve definitely had to increase the volume of gingerbread dough, and add a few tricks of the trade that we’ve picked up over the years through our own gingerbread-house-making experience — the work Moskin (and team) put into their tutorial always makes it worth a reference!
PLUS: Julia Moskin was kind enough to encourage us by retweeting our first, tentative, foray into the wild and Christmas-glee filled world of gingerbread house creation. Imagine if she could see us now š
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