A TARDIS took my finger!

"I need you to close your eyes. I need you to imagine the impro workshop has started and you're a Mum. Your child has zero artistic talent and has presented you with a REALLY ugly drawing but because it's your child, you're going to love it." - Actual dialogue.

My friend Amy is smart, gorgeous and amazingly has put up with me for the best part of a decade. Today is her 26th birthday and being a huge Doctor Who fan there was only one gift that would do ... a Gingerbread TARDIS. TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space is a fictional piece of technology used by various time lords in the series. Here is my TARDIS template which I constructed from thick cardboard ... so far so good.

I decided to follow the same Gingerbread recipe I used for my Ninjabread. So here is a photo of 250g butter with 1 cup of brown sugar beaten until creamy.

I then combined two egg yokes, 1 cup of golden syrup with the mixture before adding five cups of plain flour, 2 tablespoons of ground ginger, 2 teaspoons of mixed spice and 2 teaspoons of bicarbonate soda.

I then kneaded the dough until it combined before resting it in the fridge for half an hour. Here is the dough rolled out. Note I've decided to used a dough slicer. After laying all the pieces out carefully, I baked all the pieces for 11 minutes and even had enough left over to make a batch of gingerbread for the Improvised Theatre Class. I then lay all the pieces flat to cool, before cling wrapping them overnight. I then rose at 5am to melt the sugar, burn my fingers and glue the pieces together.

So here is the finished result. It's super ugly, but she loved it. As I said earlier, Amy has put up with me for the best part of a decade and I hope to continue to be a part of her life. Happy birthday, gorgeous girl!