As the holiday season approached this year, we in the Recchiuti ‘family’ were thinking of a fun, festive way to welcome winter to the City. One of the benefits of splitting my time between the Ferry Building shop and our offices and kitchens in the Dogpatch neighborhood is getting to be around the fabulous Ferry Building as it is decked out for the holidays and coming into work where the kitchens’ many baking and chocolate-y projects perfume the entire building with tantalizing scents. For me, nothing warms the heart and home like the smell of fresh baked goods (and a decked out tree, of course). My favorite days at the office are when the kitchens bake the graham crackers and permeate the office and kitchens with the wonderful rich scents of cinnamon, brown sugar, and vanilla. So it seemed the perfect way to usher in the holidays would be to bake something spectacular to get us in the swing of things. And since baking wasn’t festive enough we decided to go a step further and turn our grahams into the ultimate ‘gingerbread’ house.

First things first, we needed to create a sturdy base for our house. Enter Angelica, Recchiuti’s wonderful Kitchen Manager, who led me into the great unknown (aka the Recchiuti Kitchens), to experiment with our Graham Cracker dough. After consulting my trusty Joy of Cooking I created some pattern-pieces for our house and tackled the rolling, measuring, layout, and cutting of the house. I learned the hard way that this delicious and wonderful smelling graham dough is a sticky adversary, and began the chilly, somewhat floury journey into cutting out my pattern pieces and prepping them for baking. Next was the all-important baking test: would the grahams hold up in a larger than normal size? Would they bake evenly? Would they bleed and grow? Would they break? Angelica, Peter (one of our chefs), and I had our doubts… After 16 minutes of anticipation the results were in, and the grahams passed with flying colors! Beautifully golden, perfectly crisp and strong, they were the perfect platform to construct our All-Recchiuti masterpiece.

With the grahams cooling, I now got to move on to the fun part. With the oh-so-patient Peter watching me, I was set up a station in the kitchen to make a batch of Royal Icing so I could assemble our house. Oh the joys of professional kitchen equipment! (I made a second, successful batch at home, have no fear, beloved home chefs!) With icing in hand – that is, in a pastry bag – the building could begin. I used a spare cutting board covered in parchment as my base for the house, and after a few sticky icing overflows and one wall cave-in, I had a house!

Now the hard part… waiting, for at least an hour, to decorate it. We took the time to come up with crazy and creative ideas for decking-out our Graham Cracker creation. I had wild notions of enrobing the entire house in tempered chocolate and then decorating on top of it (the sheer weight of all that chocolate might have collapsed the entire project!). Angelica suggested drizzling tempered chocolate for rooftop decorations and I (more reasonably now) was looking forward to a Candied Orange Peel log pile, Marshmallow snowman, and Pates de Fruit Christmas lights and stained-glass windows.  I finally tore myself away from staring at the house long enough to whip up a fresh batch of icing to decorate the house, and after an hour of not-so-patiently waiting, it was time to decorate the house!

After frosting the roof, piping icicles off the eves, and plenty of frosting and Extra Biter Chocolate Sauce glue, (and a little snacking) we had  sweet creation. Just a few tips: if you cut the Pates de Fruit in half, the un-sugared side is marvelously sticky and requires no additional ‘glue.’ Marshmallows are great for anchoring unstable walls or for snowbanks, and also great as snowmen! And don’t be afraid to be creative, using non-food items to embellish your creation and add a personal twist to this holiday classic!

We used: Recchiuti Graham Crackers for the walls and roof; Candied Hazelnuts for the border; Pates de Fruit for the windows; Recchiuti chocolate box pads for the door; a gold Recchiuti seal attached with some Extra Bitter Chocolate Sauce for the knob; a combination of PEPs and Cherries Two Ways for the walkway; Recchiuti Vanilla Bean Marshmallow for the snowman (his nose is made of blended Pates de Fruit, with buttons and eyes of Extra Bitter Chocolate Sauce coal); Candied Orange Peel for the log pile; Pates de Fruit for Christmas lights; and finally a Crimson Recchiuti Ribbon to top off our All-Recchiuti creation.

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