How I did it: We made our gingerbread house from scratch.  The gingerbread turned out awesome!  We made a big batch of dough using a whopping five cups of flour (and it didn't even make that big of a house), rolled it out and cut it into the shapes we needed--we just used the typical two rectangles for the roof, two rectangle sides and two pieces with a point to hold up the roof.

After letting the gingerbread dry/cool overnight, it was time to put it together.  Unfortunately the whole reason we made the gingerbread house in the first place was to get rid of some extra homemade frosting we had sitting in the fridge, and since it was a couple days old it wasn't the best to use for holding the house up.  We ended up globbing it on in big thick dollops to get it to hold.  Even then, the frosting would crumble a little and the walls fell after a few minutes, so I ended up sticking bamboo skewers on the insides to get the walls to stay up.

Then we decorated using chocolate chips, sprinkles, candies, candy melts, frosting pens, a little fondant, and shredded coconut for the snow.  The house already looked so silly that we just made the whole thing look like a 3 year old did it!

Lessons & tips:

• Use fresh frosting, or at least stiff frosting that spreads or is piped easily!
• Make sure the roof pieces are rolled thinner than the walls, otherwise their weight will make it harder to get the house to stand up.
• Coconut makes really pretty snow :)

Resources: vegweb.com for the gingerbread recipe

Wilton for lots of decorating stuff

Google for pictures to use as inspiration!

Dec 17, 2008, 08:59PM PST | 0 comments | 1 cheer