I wrote this years ago now. Alton Brown remains one of my favorite TV chefs. I see everyone clicking on this post as they are looking for his gingerbread recipe. I don't know if he has one. If have posted my own here, and a clip of him teaching sugar cookie recipes which are now my gold standard go-to sugar cookie recipe.
Want a gingerbread recipe? It is here.
Alton Brown is a TV personality who has several cook books out there. While he has been a commentator on the American version of Iron Chef, my favourite show of his is Good Eats. He doesn't show off or gloss over the techniques, or the why of a certain step. His show is hilarious and a little campy. Some cooking shows out there are completely worthless for someone wanting to be educated, even if they are good entertainment. I learn stuff watching his show. Top Chef is my only other cooking show that I watch, but I have to say I learn as much about how to cook as I did about how to exercise watching Kiana Thom's "Flex Appeal."
He had an entire episode that was just on sugar cookies. Basic, no frills sugar cookies. The episode took longer than the time it takes to make and bake a batch of cookies, and I appreciated it. My mom had several cookies that she always did every year for Christmas including the Gingerbread house, but she almost never made a basic sugar cookie. Later, when I worked in a kitchen the cookies all "fell off the truck" in boxes of frozen dough that just needed to be baked. So, I had never done a sugar cookie. Here's his link:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sugar-cookies-recipe/index.html
I was interested in sugar cookies because I had tried to work with sugar in the past and been disappointed. I was given a very good lollipop recipe by the one local Rocky Mountain Chocolatier specialist, and I was grateful for it. The thing is, sugar is supposed to stay dry. If the house was only up for a week, it was all fine. For a few weeks in North Carolina, the sugar sculpture always turned into a puddle eventually. The humidity this year completely destroyed some test pieces. I had an image of doing the same thing I did with sugar cookie batter filling windows that I had done with sugar caramel in the past. I asked a chef how to keep a sugar sculpture intact for a length of time, and I was only told it had to be kept dry. North Carolina is too humid to promise that.
The lollipop stained glass effect looks nice, but the final effect isn't always worth the work. It seems store bought lollipops have some form of stabilizer in them that lets them last longer in humidity, but you need to crush them all by hand, and each bag of lollipops will have several colours so for a large project you need several bags... Only yellow really shows up in a house (purple just looks black) because there are limited ways to get light inside the house with construction. The one house I had designed with several dozen windows and completely open inside to allow all light from all angles (instead of a series of boxes placed adjacent) was a huge amount of work, and less stable to build on.
Basic physics: You can't shine light through a red window on one side and a green on on the other without losing the visual effect - we see the colour because a portion of the light spectrum is reflected and a portion is absorbed. So, to attempt to be more colourful leaves less visible colour.
Dad had recommended a light inside the house and the house built around it, but I was worried about the heat melting the sugar or causing a fire.
I tried to put sugar cookie batter inside a hole cut in the gingerbread. The gingerbread cooks for 17 minutes, and the sugar cookie cookies for 9 at a different temperature, so I did the gingerbread first alone. I would usually double bake my gingerbread anyway, so I would add the sugar cookie batter when I did the second bake. A test bake went sort of well. The sugar carmel was a much stronger building material than the sugar cookie, and the hole cut in the gingerbread cost me stability. A series of experiments showed that I could put the sugar cookie right on top of a solid gingerbread slab, and even stack the cookies. I tried to alter Alton Brown's recipe as little as possible. I didn't need to use icing to join the cookies.
I ended up with five dough colours as well as the gingerbread. I was able to make a much more vibrant colour (compared to the stained glass caramel technique) with the concentrated food colouring. Food Lion had some food colouring for icing that made the whole cookie dough slimey and less likely to keept it's shape in baking, so don't use it. I needed to use the most concentrated food colouring in the least volume possible or else add some flour if the dough was getting sticky. I had balls of Yellow, Red, Green, White and Purple.
It was a very cool outcome. I had less candy being used. The construction went faster, and the harder to reach areas that are hard to decorate afterwards all got at least partially decorated before construction.
The one for the ward:
He had an entire episode that was just on sugar cookies. Basic, no frills sugar cookies. The episode took longer than the time it takes to make and bake a batch of cookies, and I appreciated it. My mom had several cookies that she always did every year for Christmas including the Gingerbread house, but she almost never made a basic sugar cookie. Later, when I worked in a kitchen the cookies all "fell off the truck" in boxes of frozen dough that just needed to be baked. So, I had never done a sugar cookie. Here's his link:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sugar-cookies-recipe/index.html
I was interested in sugar cookies because I had tried to work with sugar in the past and been disappointed. I was given a very good lollipop recipe by the one local Rocky Mountain Chocolatier specialist, and I was grateful for it. The thing is, sugar is supposed to stay dry. If the house was only up for a week, it was all fine. For a few weeks in North Carolina, the sugar sculpture always turned into a puddle eventually. The humidity this year completely destroyed some test pieces. I had an image of doing the same thing I did with sugar cookie batter filling windows that I had done with sugar caramel in the past. I asked a chef how to keep a sugar sculpture intact for a length of time, and I was only told it had to be kept dry. North Carolina is too humid to promise that.
The lollipop stained glass effect looks nice, but the final effect isn't always worth the work. It seems store bought lollipops have some form of stabilizer in them that lets them last longer in humidity, but you need to crush them all by hand, and each bag of lollipops will have several colours so for a large project you need several bags... Only yellow really shows up in a house (purple just looks black) because there are limited ways to get light inside the house with construction. The one house I had designed with several dozen windows and completely open inside to allow all light from all angles (instead of a series of boxes placed adjacent) was a huge amount of work, and less stable to build on.
Basic physics: You can't shine light through a red window on one side and a green on on the other without losing the visual effect - we see the colour because a portion of the light spectrum is reflected and a portion is absorbed. So, to attempt to be more colourful leaves less visible colour.
Dad had recommended a light inside the house and the house built around it, but I was worried about the heat melting the sugar or causing a fire.
I tried to put sugar cookie batter inside a hole cut in the gingerbread. The gingerbread cooks for 17 minutes, and the sugar cookie cookies for 9 at a different temperature, so I did the gingerbread first alone. I would usually double bake my gingerbread anyway, so I would add the sugar cookie batter when I did the second bake. A test bake went sort of well. The sugar carmel was a much stronger building material than the sugar cookie, and the hole cut in the gingerbread cost me stability. A series of experiments showed that I could put the sugar cookie right on top of a solid gingerbread slab, and even stack the cookies. I tried to alter Alton Brown's recipe as little as possible. I didn't need to use icing to join the cookies.
I ended up with five dough colours as well as the gingerbread. I was able to make a much more vibrant colour (compared to the stained glass caramel technique) with the concentrated food colouring. Food Lion had some food colouring for icing that made the whole cookie dough slimey and less likely to keept it's shape in baking, so don't use it. I needed to use the most concentrated food colouring in the least volume possible or else add some flour if the dough was getting sticky. I had balls of Yellow, Red, Green, White and Purple.
It was a very cool outcome. I had less candy being used. The construction went faster, and the harder to reach areas that are hard to decorate afterwards all got at least partially decorated before construction.
The one for the ward:
Red and green sugar cookie door baked on gingerbread, with purple sugar cookie snowmen and a yellow sugar cookie star.
White cookie with a yellow angel on top with green hearts on top of red hearts. Some of the cookie cutters I had like the angel have seen little use over the years as the wings would just burn. With a recipe that needs only 7-9 minutes, the cookie looks great.
The trees on the side was another good experiment - the trees were baked cut in half, then assembled, then attached to the walls of the house and left to dry. No problem standing the wall up at all.
Rear view. Chocolate bears from Walmart. Green sugar cookie tree with yellow stars on top of purple stars.
I found this interesting enough to work with, and then a coworker asked me for one for her daughter's daycare. I had time, and plenty of dough left over:
More use of sugar cookie dough
Assembled, rear view
Sugar cookie roof tiles. I'm going to play with this more next year.
Final front door assembly. I had a giant candy cane on the roof line that my wife hated - so I covered it with icing and skittles. Then, it started to melt and leaked red fluid on the front door step.
So, I feel confident I have seen the rise of the sugar cookie, and the death of the lollipop window unless someone can teach me a new trick.
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