Gingerbread House 2010

For the past two years we've taken part in a local gingerbread house contest. In an attempt to top our house from last year, we created an insanely giant house that we finished in three days. It took a combination of experience, skill, insomnia, and craziness. Luckily, it paid off yet again because we took first place in our category. Here's a little walk through of all we did. You get to participate in our creation, minus the work!

This house took 4 batches of gingerbread, 3-4 batches of royal icing, a crapton of sugar, candy, and half a batch of fondant.

Even though the house was bigger, we didn't have much trouble assembling the walls and roof pieces. It just took a little bit of time for the cement-like royal icing to harden.

Detail counts. Wheat thin flooring, anyone?

What about an iconic leg lamp?

Chimney crickets!

So we have staircases, fireplace, Christmas tree, couch!

Baby Jesus and an angel had a room of their own.

This is the wrong picture, but the pattern we purchased had issues. Issues in that some of the template pieces were too large or had gaps once constructed. We trimmed all baked pieces back to the size of the template we cut out from the pdf we downloaded, too. Unfortunate, but we fixed it.

My pizzelle maker came in handy. We used extra mini pizzelles as shingles for the roof.

After the shingles were attached, we brushes edible gold luster dust mixed with beaten egg white onto the edges for shine and sparkle.

My brother created this hilarious fondant figurine scene. Fondant wife is not amused.

And that's it for this year. What's kind of funny is that as we construct our houses, we always think the effect isn't going to be what we wanted. In the end, we end up impressing ourselves by the outcome because when you're tired, in the midst of all that has to be completed, you have a bit of trouble envisioning how it will really look like.

I didn't really gross myself out this year because I didn't eat much of the candy. I wanted none of it; the sugar fumes were bad enough. The coffee beans seemed like a good idea, though later on they started falling off, we think due to the oiliness of the beans.