Gingerbread House Decorating Party

We had another gingerbread house decorating party.  I love Christmas time!  Instead of making graham cracker houses, this time we made real gingerbread houses.  This is my fist attempt at creating gingerbread in mass quantities.  I was unsure how much gingerbread I needed to make, so I went a little overboard.

I love how it looks all stacked up. After all the houses were made I had 13 packets of gingerbread dough left over!  Oops!  The recipe that I used needed to be refrigerated over night.  Each recipe make enough dough to make about 2 houses.

I used a template that I printed off and traced onto a cereal box.  This made the tracing of each of the pieces much easier.  I also made a few extra of each piece in case we had problems in the construction of the houses.

Some of the gingerbread pieces were a bit wonky.  I traced the pattern out carefully, but I think that the when they were transferred to the baking sheet the gingerbread stretched and moved a bit.  We deemed them the “made with love houses.”  The original recipe uses a caramel syrup as the glue for the houses.  We used royal icing as our glue, but I think next time we will try the caramel syrup.  Our houses took a bit of time to set up and hold their form.

This little gingerbread house collapsed, and was reconstructed into this cute little skinny house.  I love the base of candy at the bottom of the house.

We had a friendly competition after everyone was finished.  We made up different categories, and everyone voted via secret ballet.  Some of our categories included technical merit, best use of candy, best use of icing, and roof pattern.  Thanks for an amazing day guys!  Our family had so much fun!  I think that chippy enjoyed it as well:)