This is one of those hilarious posts where I really can’t say that anything at all went well. While the Vine below may well show a gingerbread sleigh being made, I can’t say I ended up with one. I was quite excited to do this one as I have never made anything in a mould before, or gingerbread – and suffice to say, I’ll probably be doing something different next time.

I would say our first mistake came from the decision to fill the whole mould, including the reindeer, when the packet itself told us to do the reindeer in chocolate. Not such a great choice as it turned out – but in our defence, the recipe was incorrect and did not ask for enough flour (hence my  not reproducing it here) and then there was far too much mixture left over. A whole gingerbread sleigh and reindeer it would be.

Next we took out the finished gingerbread from the moulds, and while this may have resulted in very tasty treats, they actually weren’t quite crispy enough. This caused problems when assembling them, as they were a bit crumbly. On top of that, filling the moulds with too much mix meant that they had overflowed their boundaries a small amount – enough that it was difficult to fit things together. In short, the reindeer died.

Actually, one of them kind of worked for a while, but leaving it stood up on its own legs for 24 hours simply resulted in a slowly crumbling reindeer a bit reminiscent of a horror movie. Not to be deterred, I decided I had a Viking sleigh and mounted the antlers on the front with some icing. White writing on the sides and a few swirls later, I at last had a decent sleigh.

This being Christmas, I held off taking some photographs while we cooked other meals and ate them, leaving it a few days in the end. At last I picked up my camera and said out loud, “I’d better take some photos of this sleigh before it falls apart.”

The universe heard.

My Dad and I watched in slow motion as the back of the sleigh gently, gradually, and without much fuss fell over, neatly knocking down one of the sides as it fell. So what you have here is a Vine of a sleigh being made and a few pictures of a broken one. Sorry about that. It was tasty though!