Construction job
About a week ago, we finally built our annual gingerbread house. I have very fond memories of building these as a kid, and my mother went to a lot of effort to bake gingerbread, mix her own royal icing, buy candies to decorate it with, and put it all together (with some help from us kids). My fondest memory of the whole gingerbread house experience was the year that Mom let my Dad and the Captain destroy it after Christmas… with the Captain’s remote control toy tank. Shades of things to come, I guess.
Last year, I bought a kit and I decided that this was the way to go until the kids are a LOT older… or until we enter some kind of competition. Our good friends A. (the computer expert and possessor of an art degree) and C. (the librarian and my teatime companion) came by to help us build and decorate their house – or to have the fun of watching the kids decorate. But first we had to surmount a small problem – getting the house to stay together. According to the directions, we should have put the house together and let it dry for at least 3 hours before decorating it. We were a little impatient and attempted to use compressed air as a cold spray to harden the royal icing, with limited success.
We finally got the house semi-stable, and while A. was busy playing with Tad, I put C. to work slicing up candy spearmint leaves to create the lovely trees you can see on the sides of the house. I iced the entire roof and then ran lines of frosting across it in a diamond pattern, leaving a dot of frosting in each diamond for Ane to put a colored candy ball.
Tad got a hold of some leftover spearmint pieces, and wanted to do his own thing with them.
He decided that Doc Hudson needed to be all decked out for Christmas. I think I might have to attempt a gingerbread car for him in a couple of years.
And here, after 24 hours of drying, and some patch-up work with frosting, is the finished product:
Next year, we will construct it properly… and then let the kids make a mess of it. It’ll be more fun that way.
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December 16th, 2007 09:55
Thank you, Deanna, Ane and Tad!
Your project brought back many memories of Mom, Dad, Bev, Faith and Alan building these just to be eaten almost immediately! Then, the times that Miss and I made the g’bread houses! Thank you for the smiles!
December 15th, 2008 00:57
[…] I had assembled our annual gingerbread house the night before (having learned the hard way last year just HOW important it is to let the “mortar” of a gingerbread house actually dry before […]