Move Over Hansel and Gretel
I think my love of photos is cultivated by the memories and real-life stories they prompt. Take this gingerbread house for example.
We were hosting the family Christmas several years ago and wanting everything to go perfectly, I became a little obsessed with the notion that a gingerbread house would provide the icing on the cake for our festive fun.
Remembering my daughters had been gifted a DIY Hansel and Gretel home, I promptly ushered them into action to construct it late on Christmas Eve.
“Mummy, the icing is all dried up and won’t stick,” my eldest daughter informed me as she tried to scrape snow across the little brown house, that was standing obligingly to attention on the worksurface.
“What do you mean?” I asked, unable to hide my irritation as I was bordering on full blown Christmas mode now and stressed up to the eyeballs.
“It doesn’t spread at all,” the youngest daughter sulkily backed her up in a rare show of sibling camaraderie.
“Oh give it here,” I muttered thinking they weren’t doing it right.
However as I grabbed the bowl of white icing, I saw that it did bear resemblance to globules of porridge which would have been more at home in another fairy tale.
Glancing at the box the house was packaged in, my eyebrows instinctively started to furrow.
“When did you get given this?” I asked the daughters whose interest in auditioning for the Great British Bake Off diminished before my very eyes, as they looked longingly at the Xbox controller trying to attract their attention from the lounge.
“Dunno,” one of them muttered.
“Oh shit,” I sighed out loud.
Realising the best before date was a couple of years ago, I also remembered we had minimal icing sugar left in the house with no transport to get to the local shops.
“Right come on,” I tried to motivate my kids. “We can’t waste this as we’ve almost finished. We’re going to have to improvise.”
To be honest I thought it was a bloody ingenious idea, but the rest of the family were somewhat dubious when they saw our gingerbread house in all its glory on Christmas Day.
“So we can’t eat any of it then?” my brother asked me, looking at the signs erected in the house’s garden which quite clearly stated in capital letters: DO NOT EAT ME.
“No,” I tried to reply patiently because it was Christmas, and everyone was meant to be merry and bright after all.
“Mummy has already told you it’s out of date,” the eldest daughter added.
“And we ran out of icing sugar and so had to decorate the outside of the house with Typex,” her sister piped up in a worryingly matter-of-fact tone, suggesting this was normal behaviour in other people’s kitchens too.
Fortunately as our dining room table was laden with ample festive fare, no one was tempted to tuck into the forbidden gingerbread house as Hansel and Gretel had done, while my dubious culinary skills also ensured this one was just as memorable.