Gingerbread 2017

It is that time of year again! Yesterday was Gingerbread Day 2017. It is one of my most favorite days of the holiday season. We make a gingerbread house (or houses) from scratch every year. Everything on our houses must be edible which is kind of a dumb rule since we never, ever, eat them ever. Nor would we want to because food safety is absolutely not our concern while we are making them.

We started the evening with the kid houses. We prebuild their houses because they aren't quite patient enough to hold the walls and roof in place until they're dry. They truly weren't all that patient anyway and asked approximately 97 times whether it was time yet.

Pinterest will tell you about the muffin tin to hold the candy. It really isn't a bad idea. We offered M&Ms, jelly beans, chocolate chips, Christmas tree sprinkles, bite sized Airheads and mini Swedish fish. 

After we were all set up... we let the kids loose! 

And their results were lovely! Obviously the advent candles are lit for ambiance and not accuracy. 

Kids Houses 2017

After we got our children nestled snug in their beds... we got to work on the adult house. This is our sixth year doing a gingerbread house as a team, but this year we really dove in. My entire goal of this house was to do windows. 

And we added windows. But we also added chocolate work, impressions and a very specific house to emulate with a roof that is best served not by gingerbread. 

This was our house in the process. We were testing the windows but I just stuck some tea lights in there, and they were flickering as candles do. And there's no roof and Husband thought it looked a little bit like Tara burning. I was pleased with how the windows turned out for our first attempt. I followed Martha Stewart's video for making windows.  And while ours definitely tasted burnt, since I didn't care if it was tasty it worked out just fine. 

Anyway... here is our finished house:

"In an old house in Paris..."

Peg Dolls from Punch and Judy Pegs. 

I am super duper pleased with how this house turned out in the end. But man did we put the effort in this year. We were working on it until about 1:30 this morning which is late even for us. 

Now, this is where I need to write things to remember in the future. We started baking really late. Like at 2:30 or so. We were really battling the royal icing and next year we need to buy more powdered sugar. One can never ever have enough powdered sugar available on Gingerbread day!! But the Just Whites company needs to start making the powdered egged white again because last year with meringue powder the icing was too stiff, and this year with pasteurized liquid egg whites it was too loose. 

Husband and I had some miscommunication. He did brick impressions on the whole house and I thought we were just doing them on the chimneys. As it happens, I didn't even get brick impressions on the chimneys which is a funny little twist that wasn't super funny to me in the heat of the moment. We take our gingerbread seriously and at that point it was a little too seriously. 

We definitely aimed high this year and man did it throw some challenges our way. (Picture me with my hair dryer trying to cure the roof... because that absolutely happened.) It was the first time in our six years I truly thought Husband was going to call it quits. In fact he did suggest that we just leave the roof off and deal with it in the morning. But we persevered and I am so glad we did!