Gingerbread House

Emboldened by my success making a giant gingerbread mushroom and not wanting my new skills to go to waste, I helped my neighbor and her 3 daughters (ages 12,10,8) to make a large gingerbread house.  I designed a four gable house so they would each have a large equal sized piece to decorate.  In their kitchen each of the girls rolled out and designed their front.  We baked them first so they would cool and they could decorate while I rolled out and baked the other pieces.

Here is the Mom and the 8yo's fronts (drying out on a cookie sheet, not baking them like this!):



And here are the 12 yo and 10 yo's fronts:



There is just a little bit of side that will show so I practiced my piping on them.  I designed it so the foot print of the house is a cross.



And here are two angles of the finished product.  I went over to take pictures last nite because the girls plan to demolish it and eat it on Christmas!





And yes those are gummy worms around some of the windows.  An innovation I never imagined.

Thanks for looking and enjoy the holidays!
Kathy

Gingerbread creation

"Deep in the Forest"   I made this for The Family Place's 13th annual Gingerbread Festival.  There was a peoples' choice vote and I was third place (adult catagory).  The big blue mushroom is about 15 inches or so tall, and the scene is all edible except for the base it sits on.  These photos are the morning before the festival before I transported it over.

I'm totally hooked!  I'm already planning next year's creation.  My friend Linda made the flowers and leaves which we dried on wax paper then I put them where I needed them later.

I got tired of making caps and stems for the smaller mushrroms and thought I'd try forming mushrrom shapes whole and cooking them.  Of course they collapsed as they cooked,  but they turned out to be perfect for the roof mushrooms.   There are little elf faces made out of marshmallows in the windows of the mushroom stem and hiding in the shrubery behind the little house.

I tried too make even the back side pretty, and I put some candy way up high under the cap.

This is the first thing I've ever made from gingerbread and royal icing.  By the time I got to the butterfly, I'd finally gotten good at the icing!  

Thanks for looking!