Posted by: Alysten on: February 21, 2011
I’ve started the preliminary designs for the English great hall which will be the centerpiece of my cake. So far it is looking big. Almost 30″ tall, 45″ wide. I will have to transport everything in pieces and then assemble the day of. The cake has to travel from Philadelphia. I cannot trust that a [...]
Posted by: Alysten on: May 26, 2009
I love discovering cool things about how stuff works! Time once again to play, that’s not right in the SCA baking world. I am doing research on Gingerbread or Lebkuchen (the german version). I have been looking for a period recipe that functions like cookies and not like candy. I have been able to find [...]
Posted by: Alysten on: April 6, 2009
We know a couple of things about gingerbread in the 16th century. We know: It was made by guilds, and written recipes are hard to come by. It was not a dessert of the common man. It was not always called gingerbread, but spiced cakes. People began to experiment with making lighter gingerbread using flour, [...]
Posted by: Alysten on: April 6, 2009
I don’t have access to any wooden molds for gingerbread. And in today’s sanitation concerned society, wooden molds are more prone to bacterial “infections/infestations”. Ceramic would probably also work, but I decided to go with food grade silicone. You can press designs into them and they are great at releasing sticky stuff like dough and [...]
Posted by: Alysten on: April 6, 2009
The first attempt at making period gingerbread was an interesting experiment. Either I made the recipe correctly and created a wonderful ginger flavored hard tack, that requires a chisel, hammer and a dentist to eat. OR it was a monumental failure on multiple levels. I followed a recipe redaction of Lebkuchen (German gingerbread). There are [...]
