Our Very First Gingerbread House

Ash and I are alone for the first Christmas ever. Our son is spending the holiday at Nana’s so he can be with his Uncle and cousin. He also has a doctor’s appointment in Michigan (which is another long story and involves the plight of healthcare in the U.S., especially for those with disabilities). Of course, that is a story for another time. Regardless, Ash and I are on our own and have decided to make the best of it, by doing cool, fun holiday things we’ve never done before.

While Ash’s brother is the king of making Gingerbread Houses, this was our first time attempting to do anything like this. Needless to say, it turned out to be a lot more fun than we anticipated!

We started out with a Gingerbread House Kit. We purchased the Create-a-treat Gingerbread House Kit, Deluxe Model from Amazon for under $10. This was a great investment.

Initially, it looked like there weren’t any broken pieces, but upon further inspection, we found one. In quick order, Ashtyn was able to patch it back together, with some creamy, thick frosting. It held together with absolutely no problems and there was no way you could tell anything had happened to the piece once the house was constructed.

I let Ash do all the heavy lifting…errrr Gingerbread House molding. This is what it looked like after she iced the house together:

This was, of course, before we started icing the roof. The problem with the icing is they say to make a 1/4 inch cut in the bag, but even this small of a cut was too big.

It would have been better to use some kind of icing squirter to make it easier, because we ended up with thick gobs of icing all over the house. Ash could not outline the windows, for example, so we just kept them covered in frosting to pass them off as “snow and ice covered”. This squirting issue was the one downside we found to the Create-a-treat Gingerbread House Kit.

From there, we started to decorate the Gingerbread House. I directed Ash and helped with the lower layers of the house, pushing the candy into place.

You can see I am hard at work pushing candy into place here:

We added the candy included in the kit. There were Round Peppermints, Gumdrops, Gumballs, Sprees and Jellybeans.

We primarily decorated the roof and the front. The only thing lacking were the amount of peppermints. They give you plenty of the other types of candy.

I was busy eating the Sprees we had to spare. I love Sprees, so I made Ash continue decorating while I chowed down!

We got one side of the roof done, so I decided to show it off. It has rows of each individual candy that is mostly color coordinated. I guess even when I am designing Gingerbread Houses, I am OCD!

I decided to make funny faces while showing off the front of our Gingerbread House, which we decided to do next!

We also decided not to do the back. The frosting was being finicky anyway. We were still having fun, as we watched Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, in the background!

Finally, Ash showed off her our hard work!

Oh! Then I made some funny, improved videos with the Gingerbread House, which you can check out at my YT Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/DominickMEvans

Making our Gingerbread House was a lot of fun. However, Ash discovered that she does not like to eat Gingerbread, and my butt really doesn’t need any. I’ve been spending the time since making it nibbling on the candies!

Happy Holidays Everyone!