Gingy's House

Christmas is one of my favorite holidays. More than anything I love the atmosphere that goes along with Christmas-that excited feeling has to be my favorite part. To be completely honest holiday food is a very close second! This year since I celebrating my first "big girl" Christmas, I get the joy of decorating my own place!

 I have my tree decorated with the beautiful vintage tree stand I gloriously won off eBay, my hand strung popcorn and cranberry garland, and my fiance's secret nutcracker collection all on display at the house but I felt that something was missing. The baker in me screamed, "Gingerbread House!"
I remembered making gingerbread houses when I was little but it was with gram crackers or nothing very elaborate. So I wanted to make something that upped the ante but something classy (aka not looking like Candy-land the board game just threw-up on it).
I found this pattern for a simple house here:
Gingerbread house pattern
Directions for making the house:
1. Make dough-I ended up going with the Better Homes and Gardens Recipe; which can be found on one of my older blogs here:Gingerbread cookies
It is just a sturdier cookie than the Betty Crocker counterpart. While the dough was chilling I cut out the pattern pieces and then traced the pieces to cardboard.
2. When rolling out the dough, I would suggest rolling it out on something like the back of a cookie sheet or a cutting board. The pieces are hard to move to the baking sheet due to their large size. So if they are on a cutting board you can just flip the pieces right onto the baking sheet. Putting a sheet of wax paper underneath can only help in the flipping process!
3. After the cookies have cooled you can use a bread knife to make the edges straighter-they will become a bit uneven throughout the cooking process.
4. I let my pieces harden up a bit over night and the next morning I made the royal icing to put it all together.
5. Cover a hard surface that the house will be going on with aluminum foil and start constructing!
6. I started with the walls, once you have the four walls up let them dry fully before putting the roof on. When you add the roof have something like a can of vegetables to hold the roof in place while it dries or it is likely to slide off. Once the roof is dry and in place decorate to your liking.

Side Note: I used the rest of my royal icing to make snow around my house and then to add snow to the roof. I also sprinkled some coconut in the snow for texture and marshmallow snowmen to line my gingerbread's walk-way.

Have fun making your own gingerbread house and let me know if you have any interesting decorating ideas!