Gingerbread mansion

November 27, 2010

It didn't take us long to dive into the Christmas festivities this year! Remember all that candy we got from MIZZOU's Homecoming Parade? And then Halloween too? Well, we like to save a good chunk of it for our Gingerbread house! This year it turned out to be a bit more of a mansion than a house.

To make these from scratch, bake the gingerbread two or three days earlier than when you are going to construct it.  Cook it for longer than the recipe calls.  Both of these tips will give you a nice hard gingerbread to work with. 

We've found that one of the best ways to get a good gingerbread house with consistently the same walls is to roll the dough out on the cookie sheet, cut out your pieces from your template, then remove the "negatives" from the sheet and cook.  That way you are never handling or accidentally manipulating the pieces.

The icing makes all the difference when "gluing" the candy on.  This year our icing was terrible.  Can you tell what kind of candy i don't let my kids eat? --  Bubble gum and suckers!

Porter joined us in his Bumbo seat and somehow managed to get his hands on a piece of the gingerbread!

Here's the almost final product.  We still had a lot of decorating to do, but we sure had fun!