02:22
Since it's been quiet in here, I'm going to take this time to explain the construction of my Gingerbread Hat.
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I based the design on the straw hat worn by Audrey Hepburn's character Eliza Doolittle at the beginning of the film My Fair Lady.
I found the dough recipe after seeing Stella Park's (Brave Tart) Halloween gingerbread house and that inspired me to play with a new medium, gingerbread. I had no idea exactly how stiff this stuff sets up, it's like concrete when it's finished. Extremely resilient and not tending towards breaking without effort.
I built it in two parts - the brim and the "bowl" of the top. I used a 7" cake pan to shape the bowl and a large, 13" tupperware container for the brim:
I eventually used four batches of dough for the full project... three initially and a fourth when I realized that I had a huge need for the texture to pipe on.
I started with the brim, a simple circle with a circle inside it.
Initially I piped the texture using a basket weave tip in a circle (starting from the center) but wasn't liking the result - it didn't match the texture of the actual hat... but part of the reason I started in the center was to test it because I knew it'd be covered by the bowl of the hat. I started zig-zagging the piping, on an angle, which gave the look I was going for.
It took a long time to get all the way around, as the dough was really thick and difficult to extrude. I broke two (disposable) piping bags in the process but was really happy with the result. I also removed the outer extra dough to allow the texture to extend past the edge slightly.
The thin (1/2") unpiped section is a retaining wall designed to prevent the dough from spreading much (per recipe instructions). You can see the 2-3 rounds of plain piping before the zig-zags start. That's prebaked, too. The zig-zag also had the benefit of allowing me to hide the breaks in piping more easily. With royal icing, it's easy to trail and get an unbroken pipe but with the dough, it's difficult.
The dark, toasted stuff in the center is the retaining wall, removed. It was thinner because it didn't have the piping, so it baked much more quickly. While you lose some of the detail in the baking process, this dough has no leaveners, so it doesn't grow much and the loss of detail was actually nice, leaving a texture very similar to the actual hat, I think.
The more difficult part in all of this was getting the bowl correct. It took several failed attempts to build it so that it could be baked. The edges of the cake pan were sharp enough that the dough broke when folded around it. In the end, I pieced it together over a sheet of parchment paper, removing the excess dough and attempting to join the seams as best I could. The parchment wasn't held down very tightly, so pushing on the dough often made it shift.
After I completed the base layer, I tossed it in the freezer for a bit to stiffen up as it was pretty thin and pliable, which made it difficult to work with when soft. While it did so, I made a new batch of dough (the fourth) so that I would have enough to pipe the full bowl. I was going to do concentric circles/spiral on the top and vertical bars on the sides to mimic the grosgrain ribbon wrapped around the hat.
I wasn't too picky about the look of the sides because I knew from the brim that it was going to soften somewhat and I wasn't even sure that the vertical part would stay together. I half expected it to all sink into a puddle... which it did, sort of. You can see that the sides are practically smooth because the dough on the edge of the top circumference sort of melted down the sides.
I trimmed off the puddling to make the base round (though I cut a couple of spots a bit thin) and was able to fairly easily remove the pan from inside thanks to the parchment paper... never try to do this without parchment... So, now I have a "finished" hat in two pieces.
This is where I made my big mistake... Well... sort of... I also got pissy and stopped taking photos for a while, so this is going to be a bit text-y... The bowl was done but it wasn't as hard as I wanted it to be... the dough wasn't baked enough. I had the brilliant idea of shoving it back in the oven upside down for a few minutes to let it dry out more. This had two negative effects:
1. The sides weren't supported sufficiently, so I got a crack in one place running nearly the full height of it.
2. The top went from a solid brown to having dark spots everywhere it touched the pan.
In my haste to "rescue" the structure, I pulled it out of the oven and dropped it back onto the cake pan to cool and hopefully save its shape... note, this time, without the parchment paper... and then we went to eat dinner and buy some brown gel food coloring to tint the entire thing darker brown.
Upon returning from dinner and putting the kiddo to bed, I went back to my toil, knowing that I needed only to cement the two pieces together, paint them and decorate them with flowers... except that I didn't plan for having to remove the bowl from the cake pan. It had become firmly attached and no amount of twisting or banging would release it. Eventually, we used a serrated knife to cut a 1" notch out of the side so that I could get a tiny spatula between the two, releasing the pan.
This process removed the entire under-layer of gingerbread from about 40% of the top of he hat, leaving only the piped part behind. This caused a small, circular crack to start in the top, which can be seen if you look for it but is not too obvious. These photos are of the damage but as it currently is, not as it was at that point. I think a few days of hanging out have caused the crack to be more obvious. You can also see the brown spots from point 2 above.
At this point, I was full steam ahead, unsure of whether it would stay together much longer or not. I started by dying the whole thing by thinning out some gel food color with vanilla vodka and painting it on with a paint brush. Vodka because it would evaporate more than water would, avoiding risking softening the gingerbread.
I mixed up some royal icing and (very poorly) colored it to "match" the rest. I should have simply kept adding brown but decided to get creative by adding black to darken it and the whole color was off... but I knew it wasn't really going to be visible, so I said, screw it. :P I glued the top and bottom together (and replaced the missing chink we cut out so that we could extricate the cake pan) and let it stiffen. (I also used Brave Tart's royal icing cement recipe
Then I had to figure out how to pipe the flowers. I'd already decided to make them shades of blue for the SE logo (and the mod diamond logo), but I had no clue how to get all of the color to go at once... so I started searching. I found a lot of technique videos but the one I found most useful is a version where you spread the frosting on plastic wrap, roll it into a tube and shove that into a piping bag... I did make some changes of my own, to the process.
I wanted to have the colors change as I pushed through the bag, so rather than making rectangles of the colors one on top of the other as the guides for this method suggest, I made more of a series of triangles with the darkest blue stopping before the end to allow the lighter ones to take over.
