P.T.G.D. – My experience with Post Traumatic Gingerbread Disorder
Leah’s two attempts: (left) The Walmart pre-made house and (right) the home-baked “mansion.”
I’m a gingerbread failure. I had all lovely ideas of baking my own gingerbread house from scratch and making homemade icing. I mean scrolling through Pinterest, it looks so easy to create “you will be green-with-envy art” out of a couple of cookies.
Originally, this story was supposed to be about how I made my own house from scratch and “ta da!” it’s gorgeous. Boy was I wrong!
First, preparing the dough is difficult and molasses smells TERRIBLE! I mean I’ve baked many cookies and cakes before, but knew this was definitely going to be different. Following the recipe, it was all coming together, and I had some faith in myself. Food Network wouldn’t let me down, right?
I chilled the dough for 30 minutes and went straight into rolling it out. One skill no one really thinks about is how a gingerbread house requires extremely precise geometry to create all those walls and roofs. I can’t be the only one who’d rather just eat the cookies than do the math.
At least by my calculations, this recipe didn’t actually produce enough dough to make all the pieces I needed. That was really just the “icing on the cake” in this little adventure!
Pressed for holiday time, the next day I decided to give up and retreat to safety… Walmart. I bought a pre-made gingerbread house for $10 and decided to emphasize my decorating skills.
When I walked into my house with the gingerbread box in hand, I had hope and faith that I would soon have a beautiful masterpiece. Opening up the box, I realized that the house was already assembled! Even better: the kit came with a piping bag of icing and cute, colorful candies to decorate with. To say I was relieved was an understatement.
Everything was looking optimistic… maybe even too good.
As I began to pipe the icing designs onto the house, I realized that this icing wasn’t sticking. It was extremely difficult to pipe on the designs and they would barely stay on the house for a few seconds before falling off. Ironically, the strings of icing stuck to my fingers.

Leah dissolved into sticky icing tears over the creation of a gingerbread house. Don’t let this happen to you.
This is when the tears started flowing.
I’d like to tell you that on Day 3, I learned my lesson and produced a glorious, candy-coated house.
No. I will never try this again. I now have a case of P.T.G.D — Post Traumatic Gingerbread Disorder.
Your donation will support the student journalists of Linganore High School. Your contribution will allow us to purchase camera equipment and cover our annual website hosting costs. We hope to raise enough money to re-start a monthly printed issue of our paper.