Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 29, 1994 TAG: 9411300003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALMENA HUGHES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"My husband plays golf, my father loves to turkey hunt, some people sew. I build gingerbread houses," Bolling said, sitting comfortably among the chaos of confections and other house-building supplies filling her Bedford workshop-cum-dining room.
She said that her love of gingerbread houses had long lain latent. As a child, she'd spend hours admiring pictures of gingerbread houses in magazines. Her sixth-grade science project was a mobile of cardboard gingerbread men. But knowing that her mother wasn't a gingerbread-house-making type, Bolling put the notion on hold while she became a pharmacist, married and started a family. Then, about 10 years ago she visited her friend Catherine Madden in Lynchburg, who'd built a gingerbread house with her daughter. Madden gave Bolling a pattern, recipe and the necessary encouragement. Bolling loved doing the project, donated her finished product to the Main Street United Methodist Church in Bedford for a fund-raiser and, the rest is housetory.
"I don't try to sell the houses because I think that would take the fun out of it,'' Bolling explained. Instead, she gives them to friends and to charities, including Holy Name of Mary Catholic Church, Bedford Primary School, James River Day School and Bedford County Memorial Hospital Auxiliary to use as fund-raisers. Monies from her hospital donations go toward renovating the skilled-care unit's multipurpose room, in honor of her grandmother, Wafe Dickason, who died five years ago.
"My grandmother was on skilled care at Bedford Hospital, mentally sharp but physically very incapacitated. One year I took a house that I had made over for her to see, and when she saw it, her eyes just lit up. I didn't have the heart to take the house away so I left it in her room. All these people were coming into the room to see the house and consequently they saw Granny, so she had all of these visitors who might not have otherwise stopped by. She was so excited. Then she died that following January right after the holidays. But the company meant so much to her."
Bolling likes to have fun with the building. Her houses are riots of colorful, mostly tiny confections, with marshmallow or ripple-candy smoke rising from Chicklets-covered chimneys, and yards lined with candy-strewn walkways, peppermint wishing wells and marzipan ducks in ponds. In her estimation, the gaudier the house and landscape, the better.
Some of her best decorating ideas - such as roofs of striped chewing gum - have come from second-grade students at James River Day School, with whom Bolling yearly builds small individual houses. Bolling also each year builds a full-size house with her children, Catherine, 10; Patrick, 8; Matthew, 6; and Andrew, 1, to be decorated any way they'd like. Tricks like these for keeping the peace aren't covered in the few books available on gingerbreading, among which "Gingerbread - Things to Make and Bake," by Teresa Layman and Barbara Morgenroth is Bolling's favorite.
By reading or from experience, other lessons she's learned include:
Don't use unwrapped chocolates; it melts and slides and makes a mess.
Tootsie Rolls, which Bolling used one year as mailbox posters, bend in warm temperatures.
Dough recipes that include eggs tend to be too soft to work with. Start by decorating the house and then the yard; otherwise, you'll knock things over.
Place the chimney opposite the door to give the house balance.
To avoid the risk of salmonella poisoning, since you've almost got to lick your fingers during building, it's easier and safer to make the "snow" frosting from Wilton's meringue powder.
Don't try to decorate the houses or even work with them on extremely rainy days; the dough changes from the moisture in the air.
And make sure that the walls' edges are aligned correctly, otherwise the roof won't fit.
"I made that mistake last year, which was amazing after building these houses for 10 years. I told myself I'd remember and didn't need to write it down, and guess what, I did the same thing again this year," Bolling said.
You might also want to keep a portfolio of photos of past houses for reference.
When the house building goes as it should, Bolling estimates that it takes about five minutes to prepare the dough using her KitchenAid mixer. To chill the dough, roll it out, cut, bake and assemble the house takes about two hours. Bolling prepares the dough and house parts and collects candies year round since the components keep well in the freezer. Completed houses can also be frozen or successfully stored for about one year inside a plastic bag in normal living conditions. She usually makes about four large houses per year.
"I really have no idea how much it costs to make a house," Bolling admitted. "I do know that it's more cost-effective to make several houses instead of just one."
It takes her about 20 to 24 hours to decorate a house, but that's because "I'm obsessed with not using cookies, I think that's a cop out; it covers a big area. I like lots of small candies in lots of colors," Bolling said.
She insisted that the houses aren't nearly as difficult to build as people think, and that it's almost impossible to decorate them wrong.
"The only real purpose of a gingerbread house is a smile," she said.
by CNB