Kurt's GingerPress

Christmas was great! Kristi and Landon came over around 9:30 in the morning. Apparently on their way over Kristi had told Landon that there will be a Thomas the Train at my parent’s place. He busted through the door, kicked off his shoes, and skipped into the kitchen eager to find Thomas. My step-dad saw him and pointed at the train and said, “Look there!”. Landon squinted his eyes, walked right up to the train, then turned to my mom and said, “Where’s Thomas?!” Aww, fail. So, we did the reasonable thing and told him Thomas was inside the train. He went the rest of the day saying, quite adorably, “Thomas lives inside that train.” In any case, nothing stopped him from eating the gingerbread.

Excitedly Tearing Open a Present

Landon Poking Thomas

Landon Stealing Coal

It’s done! The first thing I did this morning (even before breakfast!) was make some more frosting. My sister worked the night shift last night–she’s an RN–so she got off work at 7AM. Excited to continue decorating, she cowboyed up and came straight over to my parent’s house. We first decorated the engine, then she completed the worm car (see below) on her own. I finished the passenger car just before heading out to church which, like last year, featured a Christmas pageant starring all the children from the congregation…most of whom were dressed as little angels or sheep. We got back around 10:30 and I put the finishing touches–railroad tracks and sugar snow–on this year’s GingerThing.

GingerTrain - Front View

GingerTrain - Rear View

The Engine
Kristi and I designed the engine based on Thomas the Train. Landon’s favorite toy right now is his train set. I had started with two large bags of M&M minis and this used most of the blue ones. Every car has wheels made of York Peppermint Patties–the engine has six while the rest of the cars have four.

GingerTrain - Engine

Passenger Car
The most unique element of the passenger car is the Christmas tree adorning the roof of the car. I used one of the two boxcars as the structure and wanted the design to look like it had some people riding along. The little heads in the window are Sour Patch Kids. You can also see the connector between the cars is a small strand of Twizzler Pull & Peel licorice.

GingerTrain - Passenger Car

Coal Car
The third car in the train (and the one I teased folks with yesterday) is the coal car. You can see I have now filled it with a heaping mound of Cocoa Puffs coal.

GingerTrain - Coal Car

Log Car
This one has proven to be a crowd favorite with the family. The logs are Reese’s Sticks. The thinner logs are actually from a box of low calorie snacks because I ran out of the full size logs. So, for the anti-guilt diners there is, for the first time, something to eat. I used some peeled licorice to tie down the logs and “bolt” them to the platform with berry Jelly Beans.

GingerTrain - Log Car

Worm Car
When Kristi and I were shopping for candy the other night I mentioned that I wanted to have two open-top cargo cars but I wasn’t sure what else a train would be carrying besides coal. She suggested we fill it with dirt which I thought sounded like a reasonable thing for a train to carry. Then, as we scanned the shelves she spotted the gummy worms and thought up the idea to infest the dirt. Perfect! The dirt itself is a mix of cocoa powder and the rest of the box of Cocoa Puffs, which i ground to a pulp in the food processor.

GingerTrain - Worm Car

Caboose
Rounding out the train our red and green caboose. We originally wanted to make the whole thing red except for the windows and rear rail but there simply weren’t enough red M&Ms, so we went with a festive red and green look. I added the tail lights on the very back (which you can see better from the rear facing picture at the top of this post) after my parents brought back the peppermints from the Thai restaurant last night.

GingerTrain - Caboose

And now some stats. This year’s creation is just over 60 inches long plus 10 inches of track on each end. The box cars stand at 6 inches tall and 5 inches wide. I used 10 pounds of flour, 8 pounds of powdered sugar, 14 eggs, one box of Cocoa Puffs, and a small fortune in candy. We’ll see what Landon thinks when he gets here on Christmas morning!

The Train

Jamie and I just got back from seeing a production of Cinderella at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati with her family and some of her dad’s co-workers. So, tonight is going to be a short post. I spent most of the morning decorating the coal car and another cargo car. My sister came over around lunchtime to decorate the caboose. Lots more tomorrow!

A Boxcar on the Assembly Line

Coal Car (sans coal)

Oh, and for some real engineering. My step-dad spent the day building some stairs for a loft in our basement storage room. I helped carry lumber around the house at various points during the day so I thought a progress shot was in order.

New Basement Stairs

I woke up at 7:00 today and my first thought was: time to bake the rest of the pieces! I headed downstairs, poured some OJ, and pre-heated the ovens. I estimated that I would only need half as much dough today…I needed a lot of small pieces for the cargo cars and a couple shapes for the engine. Well, it turns out I really only needed about 1/4 as much as yesterday. But the scraps were so popular yesterday that I went ahead and rolled the remaining dough into two pizza-shaped crusts.

Day 2 Train Pieces

GingerPizzas!

By the time I had finished baking yesterday my grandma had already retired to her room. And, this is the first time in many years that she has made it to Cincinnati for Christmas so she has seen pictures but never tasted a GingerThing. Thus, today my gingerbread met the ultimate judge and jury of holiday baking. When she decided to taste a piece I was standing in the kitchen with my sister and my mom. Just looking at this picture again makes me nervous!

Gingerbread Judging

The verdict: she went for a second piece! Whew!! That was a close one.

I let the newly baked pieces cool all day so I could start assembling everything in the evening. None of today’s pieces would be load bearing so they didn’t need to harden completely. This year, for the first time ever, the structure would not be attached and supported by a cutting board. Each train car will be independently movable–it won’t roll like a real toy but it can be lifted and placed elsewhere. As a result, the bottom pieces of each car need to support the weight of the gingerbread, candy, and frosting attached on top. I picked the six thickest pieces to use as bases then pulled out a few pounds of powdered sugar. Mmm frosting.

Like last year, I made chocolate royal icing to use as the “glue” in all of the train cars. Last year I had some trouble adding the white decorative frosting on top of the chocolate frosting along the edges, especially when I had let the chocolate puff up as I pressed pieces into it. This year I let the icing within the structure remain puffy (and sloppy) but I used a wet knife to peel away most of the exterior chocolate frosting after it had set for a few minutes. In theory, this change should make it easier to pipe the white frosting on the edges tomorrow. Most of the cars are ready to decorate though I will let them harden overnight before I try to lift them up and add wheels. Because there are so many elements (and various family activities leading up to Christmas) I am giving myself two days to decorate. Hopefully tomorrow morning Jamie, my sister, and I can start adding some color.

GingerTrain Engine

A big thank you to Kristi for helping cut out all of these bad boys…it took us about 3 hours to get all of this prepared and baked. We used the entire batch of dough I made earlier in the day so I’ll have to make more tomorrow morning for the remaining pieces. The blue bowl you see in the bottom right of the picture had scrap pieces in it at one point but my family got to it before I went to get my camera.

And props to the soul who thought to put two ovens in one unit!

Day 1 Train Pieces