Gingerbread House

Seminary housing had a gingerbread contest this Christmas, so Andrew and I rose to the challenge!

We found a template for a gingerbread house, sized it, printed it, and used it to cut out the gingerbread pieces.

Then we baked the gingerbread, crushed butterscotch candies, filled the windows, and put the pieces back in the oven to melt. Before assembling, I piped on the details and Andrew sanded down the edges to fit perfectly with the micro-plane grater.

Andrew made a box base and covered it with foil. He put holes in it so we could fill it with Christmas lights. They lit up the melted candy in the windows to make the house glow. We then put together the house around the bunched up Christmas lights.

Here's the finished product (pardon the not-so-great lighting).

The trees are upside down ice cream cones with dark green icing piped with a star tip. After they dried, I used meringue powder and water (egg whites would have worked, too) to glue on some sanding sugar snow to the branches.

We also added candy canes to the corners of the house.

The snow on the ground is royal icing covered with sanding sugar.

The ceiling is wheat Chex cereal. This took forever! We had to get the Chex pieces to be just the right shape and size to fit in odd roof angles. We dusted the finished roof with powdered sugar snow.

The walkway is made of cappuccino jelly beans.

The berries on the greenery are red sprinkles that I added with tweezers.

We won the housing competition and probably started a new Christmas tradition! This was a lot of fun!