There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are more interested in the appearance of food, and those who are more interested in the taste. (Joke–there are two kinds of people in the world–those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and…)

Okay, it’s really more of a spectrum, but by way of illustration, every year I see magazines in the checkout showing clever ways to create cupcakes that look like spiders for Halloween, cookies that look like nests of eggs for Easter, and so forth. These are ingenious and very attractive comestibles, and I appreciate them as such, but I also can’t help thinking–do licorice whips really taste good with chocolate cake? Will the marshmallows work with pretzel sticks?

Partly for that reason, I’ve never been all that excited about making gingerbread houses, even though I love baking. I’ve always seen them as purely decorative–after all, surely pretzel logs and Necco wafers don’t taste as good combined with gingerbread. My husband, on the other hand, sees gingerbread houses as edible as well as decorative. His position is that one should enjoy it for a few days, then start picking candies off, then eat the cookie before it gets stale.

Still, I do like to decorate sweets, and I do like constructing things. This year, I had an urge to make a cookie house, possibly as a result of watching too many episodes of The Great British Baking Show. But did it have to be made of construction gingerbread? What other flavors might there be?

In looking up recipes, I found some blogs with pictures of miniature cookie houses: Pretty Petunias and For the love of butter, among others.

Brilliant! Not only were the little houses cute, but they had the following advantages over full-size cookie houses.

–I could make cookie houses and still enjoy fresh cookies from the rest of the dough.

–Each person could decorate their own house.

–It would be easier to cover the finished houses (to protect them from our cat who has been known to lick at them.)

–The cookies would not need to be quite so sturdy as the pieces would be smaller and subject to less tension and compression. (Thank you, Stephen Ressler of The Great Courses for the engineering vocabulary!)

–And finally, we could eat one while still enjoying the appearance of the remaining ones.

I tried two different doughs, and I tried cutting out my own small pattern (which was a bit of a pain) and then bought some ready-made cookie cutters for mini cookie houses. Photos below.

I’m not going to provide links to recipes, as the recipes I tried were okay but not thrilling. Better that you should scout around for recipes you find exciting and try those. (And then let me know, please, if you find a recipe you think is especially good.)

I will provide links to some of the cookie cutters, however, because they make it much easier. I didn’t recut my pieces after they were baked, which probably would have improved the results, but they stuck together all right anyway.

These are the cookie cutters I bought:

Fox Run Christmas Village

and this mini set which seems to come from several different sources. There is also one that cuts out all the pieces at once, which I didn’t try.

Till next post.