Gingerbread House!

So Dave and I volunteered at the Festival of Trees a couple of weeks ago together. While there we saw several gingerbread houses that were nothing less than sheer works of art. Some were even more elaborate than what you see at the gingerbread house displays in San Francisco. Dave suggested that we make our own gingerbread house. So I asked, "What, like with graham crackers?" "Yeah. That sounds good." Not me! I decided that we needed to go for the real deal. So we teamed up all of Dave's construction skills and all of my baking expertise to construct our little home!

Step one involved design, making dough, cutting and baking. Gingerbread usually expands a little, (and in our case it did a lot), so we cut the pieces, half-baked them, cut them a second time, and then finished baking. When we pulled them out to cut them again, they had greatly expanded and Dave wanted to abort the mission! (Oh thou of little faith...) This is us cutting them out again, doubt smeared all over Dave's face. Such disdain!


But I was pretty determined and the pieces came out looking so good!






We glued it all together with a couple of batches of caramelized sugar. (Sorry about the burning potential! I may or may not have given Dave a nice second degree burn on his finger while I was gluing something.... oops...)

The last bit, of course, was decoration! With some solid royal icing, we transformed our two-story gingerbread house into a little home complete with icicles and a car in the driveway. Yay! (And if you look really closely, you can see the gingerbread man cutout between the garage and the house, like someone ran through it. Dave's idea, and he is SO proud of it, as well as the garage-- there was no way he was going to have a house without a garage!)




Merry Christmas!