Gluten Free GingerBread People with Egg Free Royal Icing

I have decided to take it easy on myself this year. I realized that I just don't have the time or the energy to make a ginger bread house, then I patted myself on the back and said "that's OK". However, I did still want to post my egg-free royal icing recipe, so we decided to make gingerbread people instead. For this I did not even need to create a recipe, I borrowed this wonderful recipe from Janeen at Mom's Food Allergy Diner, which is egg free, dairy free, gluten free, and nut free. I didn't have any Bette Hagman's Gourmet Light Flour Blend so I had to play with the flours a little bit. My final flour blend was:
1 ½ c Sorghum flour
1 c Tapioca starch
1 ½ c Rice flour
½ c Cornstarch
½ c Potato flour
This is a whole cup more flour than the original recipe called for, but it worked well for us. It could be the humidity or the altitude, who knows. After baking the gingerbread people, the girls decorated them with egg-free royal icing. So, here are our little gingerbread people (the ones who haven't been eaten yet) saying "Merry Christmas everyone"!

Merry Christmas From Our New Home!

A dear old friend of my husband came to visit this week. He is an amazing photographer, and I finally got some pictures of my new house. This (among other things) is what has taken so much time away from my blogging for the past 5 months. It is finally starting to feel like home though. Isn't it beautiful all covered in snow? It is a whopping -9 degrees here this morning. It was freezing all weekend, but we still managed to get our tree too. Thanks again to our friend for taking these pictures for me!!! These are just snapshots. If you want to see some of his truly breathtaking nature photos you can find him at http://treesloth.printroom.com/GHome_main.asp?domain_name=treesloth .


A VERY HAPPY HOLIDAY SEASON TO EVERYONE! :)

Egg Free Royal Icing

I have been holding on to this recipe for a year. Actually, I lost it when my hard drive died and was thrilled to see that I had posted it on another site so I was able to get it back. The other site, by the way, is http://hoppobumpo.blogspot.com/2008/12/great-eggless-royal-icing-experiment.html , and has amazingly detailed descriptions of several other egg free royal icing recipes. I made my icing thick. It was strong enough to assemble a gingerbread house and was hard as a rock by the next day. It also tasted good! You can thin it out a little if you want drippy snow-like icing for the roof, but I don't know how long it will take to harden. I wish very much that I had pictures to show, but we don't have any working cameras in the house. If I can get a decent picture with my disposable camera, I will post it later. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!

1 c Powdered sugar
1 T Ener-G egg replacer (dry)
1 t Cream of tartar
1/8 t Xanthan gum
2 T Water (approximately)

Blend all dry ingredients together. Add water slowly until desired consistency is reached.