A gingerbread house made of crackers, cheese, and cured meats
Picture a gingerbread house, but instead of gingerbread and frosting, it is made out of crackers, cheese, and cured meats. My friends and I are fans of eating salami and havarti while pretending to be fancy. So, naturally, when we saw on the Internet a picture of a charcuterie chalet, we knew we had to try it out. Below is a step-by-step account of our journey.
- Do some research. We weren’t sure how to make the house-shaped base, so we typed “charcuterie chalet” into Google and found a blog post that used crackers and cream cheese to construct the base. It seemed like a lot of work to assemble.
- Find a ready-made house instead. We found a box of chocolates that was shaped in a box so we decided to use that as our base instead. We figured we could just cover it up with some parchment paper and it’d be fine. It all goes downhill from here.
- Assemble the ingredients. Each of us brings a selection of cheese and cured meats. I pick up a spicy salami and a block of Red Leicester from a shop in the St. Lawrence Market on one of my weekly grocery runs. I watch “Professional Chefs Blindly Taste Test Cured Meats” to learn the difference between salami and prosciutto.
- Realize we forgot something to be the “glue”. In the blog post, the cream cheese was used to connect the crackers. We thought we didn’t need cream cheese because we didn’t need to connect the crackers. However, prosciutto doesn’t naturally stick to parchment paper because of gravity. We had no means of making windows or even a roof.
- Attempt to assemble anyway. We try to drape the prosciutto to form a roof and walls. We lean slices of cheese on the house as a door. We scrunch salami in an attempt to make bushes, and lay crackers out as a path to the aforementioned door.
- Nothing is working. It looks very ugly. The chalet becomes a pile of prosciutto. We take a photo to document our failure.
Give up and assemble a regular charcuterie board. I don’t manage failure well, so we remove the prosciutto, get rid of the house, and rearrange the materials in an attempt to salvage our pride. It ends up looking alright so we take a photo to post on the ‘gram.
