Gingerbread House 2012 Christmas

I love Christmas, and I always enjoy making a Gingebread house too. My favourite feature is the roof, which I cover in m&m's or Smarties. It's become a bit of a tradition to take one to my family's Christmas get together on Boxing Day.
This is 2011's...

2011 Gingerbread House

2011

Last year my brother challenged me to create either a double storey or a house with rooms for 2012. So I decided to do the double storey. I found a template at graphicality but knew that I couldn't fit both wings on if I wanted to transport it two hours to the country, so I only did one.

My friend Johnny is very creative and also makes gingerbread houses. He was my competition this year. Even if his house was crap it'd still look better because he has the skillz with the cameraz. But it was amazing. This was his creation:

Another friend, Emily, was making her first gingerbread house this year, based on this hilarious version. We're yet to see her interpretation though.

Crack (Gingerbread) House

For the first time ever (or maybe since Year 12) I was working right up until the 21st of December, which meant that I was so disorganised for Christmas when I am usually super organised. I put my tree up at the end of October, and then from then on it was bedlam until Boxing Day. I made royal icing iced gingebread and gluten free shortbread for the staff morning tea on Friday 21st at school. I was making dough for these cookies before school between waking up and leaving I was that short on time. So I left the gingerbread house very late.
Here's a few filtered photos of my gingerbread making:

I am yet to perfect dying food. It appears to just dye my hands instead...

(background is the outline of my shortbread snowflake cookies drying)

 

 

Now to my 2012 gingerbread house. I made the dough on Saturday night (22nd), got up at 6.30am on Sunday and spent 3 hours in the kitchen rolling and cutting the dough (using my templates) until about 10.30. By then it was already 30 degrees and my apartment (which has no aircon) was like a sauna, so I stopped.

Creative shot of the sugar, butter and honey

gingerbread cooling

I had to wait until the Monday 24th to start decorating because it was too hot to be playing with chocolate, and hoping sugar would dry quickly and hard. Saturday arvo I had been supermarket shopping for some pure icing sugar. I had most of my chocolates already. But my local supermarket was sold out of pure icing sugar and I had a minor freak out. Sunday I drove to another supermarket and found some. Whew.

I had a lot of trouble this year deciding how to decorate my house. I'd seen so many different ways on Pinterest. I'd love to do a pastel one, but our Christmas was mainly red and green this year, with a touch of pink for the little girls. So I had to stick mainly with those colours.
I ended up doing and m&m and Smartie roof, same for bricks on the 3 storey part. These were brown but they look a bit halloweeny. Wasn't too pleased with it. Then mosaic freckles for the sides. I normally do a bullet fence, but I stole my friend Chris's mum's idea of using a curly wurly for the fence. It was super cute. It was the only part that got a bit melty and wrecked in the car ride to Heathcote. But normally the fence gets a bit wrecked anyway as it's around the edge.

the green light was just a glow stick for fun

little table and chairs and presents under the tree

Still hoping to get a photo from Emily of the crack house, but until then, this is my gingerbread house. I was pretty happy with it in the end. Although I hated the tree. Next year I think I'm just going to go back to the normal house, and put some rooms inside it. (Unless I'm in Paris!)