The best things in life are free: Gingerhenge

It was a few days before Christmas when we saw a gingerbread house being built on a cooking show. I am not sure what was it about a cake made of one whole pack of butter and half a pack of sugar that appealed to us, but we got to chatting about all sort of gingerbread architectural projects, until Dan came up with this: a gingerbread Stonehenge - THE GINGERHENGE.

So we got to work! We used this recipe for the gingerbread, only substituting light sugar for dark sugar. We did this because we wanted a lighter base in order to give a stone-like aspect to the gingerbread. To do this, we added some black food colouring to the dough. Because there is no water in the dough, only butter, sugar, and flour, normal food colouring doesn't mix in, as you can see below. We thought this gave it a more rocky aspect.

To my constant amazement, Dan spent hours researching the number of slabs at Stonehenge, how many large or small, so he cut the dough into the required shapes before going into the oven. Now, with hindsight, we should have realized that they would change shape in the heat and allowed for that, so in the end he still had to cut them into shape.

So, we also needed a base for the slabs to go on, so we baked a thin flat sponge (I guess it could be any sort of sponge cake dough, but we made a coffee and ginger sponge). Below, it is being carved to show the road into the stone circle.

To have a lighter icing on the base, we made a cream cheese icing. The problem with that is that it becomes dry and cracks after a few days. Still good to eat, but stops being esthetically pleasing. We thought it might be better to go with butter icing next time. We put some green food colouring in to give it a grassy aspect.

And now for the assembly. In the first photo you can actually see the plan Dan constructed of all the slabs at Stonehenge, standing or fallen down, at cake-scale. He secured the top slabs with bits of toothpick.