Gingerbread jihad

So recently I have been on an absolute baking spree, and I have to say I am enjoying every minute of it. Usually my compulsive baking is linked to nerves or stress (don't tell me I'm the only one who whipped up a batch of election cupcakes!) but lately I've just had itchy baking fingers.

Tonight I found myself at my parents' place, drinking Baileys with my mama and baking an army of gingerbread stars and hearts. I amused myself by imagining a star/heart gingerbread war, with each side attacking and devouring the other until they realised the devastating (and cannabalistic) gingerbread cost. Grief-stricken, many of the remaining soldiers offered up their lives in a ritual fire. This explains why there were half as many biscuits left in the kitchen an hour after I baked them as there should have been and why a few where looking a little charry around the edges. Well, actually, my sisters were probably responsible for some of the devastation...

We don't have that many holiday traditions in my family, as we tend to alternate Christmas and Channukah as the Big Deal holiday and thus get lazy about every-year kind of things. But one thing we've done consistently, without fail, is make gingerbread houses, decorated austerely with dustings of icing sugar or riotously with raspberries, mint leaves, smarties and liquorice all-sorts. Christmas is really one of the few times of the year that it's socially accptable to bake like a motherfucker, so I tend to take full advantage of people's willingness to eat tiny gingerbread soldiers and proceed accordingly.

Recently the whole gingerbread thing has gotten a bit out of hand, and I've found myself manning gingerbread house construction lines staffed with neighbourhood children, tiny cousins and tipsy best friends. Which is nice. Although, when I think about it, one of the warmest, fuzziest parts of the experience, for me, is remembering making the houses as a child with a twinkly old German woman named Sigrid. These poor neighbourhood children are going to remember some vintage-dress-wearing twenty-year-old, hepped up on sugar, swearing in French, and making up songs about the various stages of baking. Oh dear.

Anyway, I have such nice memories connected to the gingerbreading, and that's probably part of my deepseated baking fetish. The other part is probably pathological. But what the hell! We will let them eat cake, or at least gingerbread. And then let them lie down on the couch with a strange craving for gherkins wondering how it is possible to ingest that much molasses in one sitting as they fall into a hyperglycaemic swoon. Er, not that I would know anything about that...