good sunday morning to you my friend! 

to answer your question about frosting for holding together and decorating a gingerbread house, may i suggest Wilton’s Royal Icing recipe.  Any of your local stores that sell Wilton cake baking/decorating supplies (such as Michaels’ where i purchase mine) will have royal icing mix, or  Meringue Powder for you to make your own. i’ts not hard to do and it is a stiff, sweet icing that dries quickly ‘candy-hard’ so it holds like super-glue. i’ts pure white so it resembles snow too, tho i usually dust mine over with granulated sugar to give it that sparkly look before it dries.

Royal Icing  (for candy-hard decorating)

3 T. Wilton Meringue Powder

1#-(4C.) confectioners sugar

6 T. warm water*

NOTE:  keep all utensils grease-free for proper icing consistecy.

Beat all ingredients until icing forms peaks (7-10 minutes at low speed with a heavy-duty mixer; 10-12 minutes at high speed with a hand-held mixer)

recipe makes 3 cups

*for stiffer icing, use 1T. less water

keeping the bowl covered with a wet towel will help the icing keep from drying out while you’re using it.

We cheated this year and i bought one of the pre-baked gingerbread house kits. it was less than $8 at Michaels (tho they had a $40 version also) and it was sufficient for us to make a ‘royal mess’ of the kitchen, with 4 adults and 1 2-year old building the thing. the kid included a cardboard base, the icing mix, and more than enough sufficient amount of candies to decorate it with.   when i get my pics developed (i don’t have a digi-cam) i’ll post a picture of the end result.  it was a fun time together!

some of the things that we’ve done in the past and didn’t do this year….  take a regular sugar cone ice cream cone and invert it on the gingerbread base as a xmas tree. decorate it with green leaves and red ornaments using regular icing.  you can also make and decorate snowmen out of marshmallows. (my daughter made a reindeer out of them for the rooftop)  use your imaginations and have a blast!!!!

we have a swedish smorgasbord for christmas every year. usually that contains a potato dish and a bean dish.  from time to time we vary from the traditional to include something new too.  this year in place of the scalloped potatoes, my sister is making a hash brown cassarole that we all just love!  the traditional brown bean dish has been replaced by a green bean one for a number of years, as that’s more likely to be eaten over the brown beans.  desserts traditionally include frutsoppa (or fruit soup made from dried apricots, raisins, prunes, etc) and ginger cookies called pepperkaker.  for the meat mains, we have a ham, swedish meatballs and potattaskorg (potato sausage).  rice pudding with lingonberry sauce replaces what jello there might be.  there are a variety of homemade breads (limpa rye, cardamon cake, and kakabrod which i usually make)  there is usually a nice block of farmers’ cheese (bond-ost) and some sort of pickled herring, but nobody eats the pickled fish (i’ts really nasty) and the cheese has become quite hard to find around here.

are you familiar with the christian contemporary artist group “Petra”??  they were one of my favorites/originals from 30 years ago…..they’ve just recently disbanded, but they had a song entitled, “aliens and strangers”  and i loved it….

well, this is long, so i’d better go. gotta wake up the girl for church!  ttyl! ~bette

i am of swedish/welsh descent.  both sets of grandparents came over from thier respective countries seeking a better life for their families in the early 1900′s.  my father’s family is from sweden.  he and his 2 siblings were all born here, tho he was ‘carried’ inutero accross the seas.  my mother’s family is from wales and she and her 3 siblings were all born here as well, my mother being the youngest of the 4.  on my fathers side, my grandparents have both died, as well as my uncle.  my aunt lives in florida and lost her husband recently.  my mother is the only living child in her line and she will be 89 on December 30th.  her father died when she was young, her mother when i was 12.  my 2 uncles and 1 aunt have been gone now for some time.  family time at the holidays is especially important to my parents now….my dad was 91 in september.  we try to adapt some of the recipes to more healthful representations of same…sometimes that’s difficult, but carrying on the traditions of these cultures has been a legacy that i have enjoyed very much and hope to have instilled in my children as well to carry on.  i’ve never been to either Sweden or to Wales, tho some of the family members have gone to visit relatives there.  it is enough for me to know that i have relatives there…and that in my own way, i can carry on the traditional customs to some degree.  as i make these foods i think of my grandparents and remember them fondly. i’ts an important time for me.

my husbands family was from Holland.  before we were married, i learned how to make a few Dutch treats as well, so they have worked thier way into the christmas fare as well.  jim has been dead for almost 6 years now, but we still have Dutch pastry at christmas time, and i believe that it is comforting for us to do so in his memory.

have a wonderful week now, and good luck with the gingerbread!