Sorry, couldn’t resist the aliteration again 🙂

We also couldn’t resist Dawn’s gingerbread house from www.ketocook.com. We started the recipe yesterday, but then Nora got an unhappy surprise from the vomit elf. Thankfully, she felt better in just a few hours and is fine now. We are still wondering what happened. We have all felt just a bit off the last few days, so maybe it is just a little virus. We also opened a new pint of cream which seemed fine right away, but the second time Nora had some she complained that it tasted bad. It was bitter. We think it was just beginning to sour, so maybe that was the culprit? But Nora has been fine since so all is well today.

It’s also Nora’s half birthday today! She’s 4 1/2! To celebrate, we put a candle in her gingerbread house as the chimney and she ate the roof for breakfast. And in 2 days it will be her 8-month-seizure-free anniversary! So many celebrations!

Nora can’t eat the whole thing because it is far too many carbs and calories. To serve, I pre-weighed the pieces of the house. I made sure each matching piece was the same weight–the 2 roof pieces, the 2 side walls, and the 2 peaked walls. She ate both roof pieces for breakfast, so I knew how much dough went into each piece of cookie, and the amount of frosting needed to get the ratio to 3.5:1. She can eat the rest of the house for snacks today and tomorrow and I will know how to account for it.

I adjusted Dawn’s recipe to decrease the carbs a bit. I substituted hazelnut meal and a bit of flaxseed meal for the almond flour. My gingerbread looks a little more rustic as a result. I also made a triple-batch of dough out of spur of the moment laziness. The recipe called for 20 g of egg, and the egg that I cracked was right on 60 g. It seemed easiest to just triple it instead of holding on to the extra 40 g of egg and finding another use for it. Of course, that bought me more work in the long run, but Nora got more gingerbread!

Because I made more dough, I had more to work with when I rolled it out. I tried to follow Dawn’s general dimensions but mis-measured the walls  and ended up making a bigger house than Dawn’s. If you look at the picture of Nora’s house and make Dawn’s recipe, just know that you won’t have enough dough in a batch to make a house that is this big. I overdid it. As you can see, I weighed the cut pieces of dough before baking them. The chilled dough was sturdy enough to move from scale to cookie sheet and back again. I could also weigh each matching piece and adjust to make them the same weight.

I also made the buttercream frosting recipe for the icing. This was so good! And it used up 23 g of our protein powder making the 4:1 ratio recipe! Yippee! To add some flavor, I made some Celestial Seasonings Gingerbread tea and used that for the 50 g of water called for in the recipe. I also added a packet of Nora’s Cytra-K for it’s sweetness. As you can probably tell, my frosting is not white, but light warm brown. It looks good and it tastes wonderful. If I make the frosting again for other treats, I might use peppermint tea or another flavor in place of the water, depending on the recipe.

The buttercream frosting is also great because it hardens when chilled. I had to keep the frosting around room temperature to work with it, then we put it in the fridge to harden. Works like a dream.

Nora directed the decorating on the gram scale. I calculated that I needed a little more weight in frosting than weight in cookie to make this a 3.5:1 ratio snack. Because I knew the weight of the baked cookies, I knew the total weight that the whole house should be when finished (baked cookies plus weight of required frosting). We could assemble it right on the gram scale, adding the walls and roof as necessary, and adding frosting until we reached the required total weight.

We also cut some mini gingerbread people and trees with the rest of our dough. I made sure that they were all 4 grams of dough so that they could be served without weighing and calculating. Then I frosted them all with 2 g of frosting because that would fit easily on the cookie. They are not at-ratio snacks so we will have to serve with tea and cream.

We have a very full fridge of Keto Kristmas Kookies! And a happy Nora. I told Ted that I am done baking for awhile, and in the next moment I realized that we are out of some of Nora’s other daily baked goods, like fiber rolls and pumpkin bars for breakfast. Sigh. She will be eating gingerbread for breakfast this week. I think I will try to hold off on more baking until I find out if we are getting a stand mixer for Christmas 🙂