As a kick off, I
thought I'd share my first try with decorating a gingerbread house over the recent Christmas holiday. It shouldn't technically count because I did it at home in my dad's incredibly large kitchen, but it was a lot of fun and I'm very proud of how it turned out. I cheated because I didn't make the gingerbread. I bought one of those assemble yourself Wilton kits, which started out okay, but the icing and I had some disagreements. You get this whole bag of icing mix, but you have to let the basic structure (sides of the house and the roof) sit for a couple of hours to set before you start decorating and that is where the first argument took place between me and the icing. When icing sits, it hardens. When it hardens, you then can't use it later to contin
ue decorating. You can try just adding more water, but it doesn't really work. So the first batch of icing was great (I only made part of the bag originally), but after it hardened, the second batch didn't work out so well. It was a little drippy and I have had no experience working with icing bags and tips, so I did the best I could. It has just enough body to stick, but not enough to do any sort of decorative elements. I decided to try and work as much with the candy they give you with the silly things as I could. My original plan was to make one of the houses in the picture which is how this one started...but once the icing started giving me lip, there was no turning back and I had to go rogue.The snowflakes were something I'd bought to decorate the sugar cookies we'd made earlier in the week - they were some sort of berry flavored
edible sugar concoction with the texture of foam. Very strange, but worked out very well for this project. I decided to change direction and rather than the so-called "Candy Cottage" on the box, I decided that I would try for "Snowflake Cottage" instead. You can't have any sort of cottage without windows, so my mom helped me roll out gumdrops into flat gummy pancakes - they stick to the rolling pin and tear apart easily. We took our flat gummy pancakes and cut out window panes for the sides of the cottage. We did diamond shaped panes for decorative windows at the front of the house and stuck them to the front with icing and then piped around them. For the sides and the back, we did more traditional four pane windows by cutting two rectangular pieces and sticking them to the sides of the house with icing and then pipin
g around the sides and piping a line through the middle to separate the panes. I don't have a picture of it, but besides the square window on the back of the house we also repeated the diamond panes as well. I added a snowflake fence along the front of the house and then dusted the whole thing with confectioner's sugar to make is look like snow. The whole family got involved in that one: my dad found us a box to put the house in while dusting it so I wouldn't make a mess, Richard found me the decorative silver platter to set it on when we were finished for presentation and my mom set everything up so I could transfer the whole structure from the table to the box for dusting and back to the serving platter when we were done without dropping the house or killing myself. At the end, we had a very lovely "Snow Flake Cottage" dusted with snow and displayed for the holidays.It lasted almost a fu
ll week before one of the dogs finally got to the gingerbread on the back of the house. At that point I started picking candy off and I did saw off the back corner of the roof to see what it tasted like. It tasted a little like gingerbread flavored cardboard, but I guess it has to in order to be strong enough to make a house. All in all it was an interesting experience, but if I'm going to do it again, I think I'm going to have to try making my own gingerbread and I'm going to have to do some more experimenting with icing so I have a better handle on what I'm doing texture wise.
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