Iris and I make a gingerbread house every year, but this year is special! We are branching out and not using a kit. I’m hoping our tradition will grow and so will our skills. This year I picked a saltbox-style house from Bob Vila.com. Go figure! For about a month we’ve been scouting grocery stores, Target, Walgreens, and other places for our stash of candy to decorate. I found a great recipe for the gingerbread and for royal icing in a book titled The Gingerbread Architect by Susan Matheson and Lauren Chattman.
Here is Phase 1 of our project. Oh, I should add, I went to Kinkos and enlarged the house plans I downloaded because I wanted it just a tad bigger. Here is the finished dough. Guess who poured the flour?
Cutting out the windows of the house.
After rolling out the dough and cutting out the pieces, Iris filled the windows w/ pulverized butter rum candies for the windows. After filling the windows we baked for another 5 minutes, the candy melts, and bam, we have windows!
More window filling.
Here are all the baked pieces ready for assembly. B cut out a base w/ 3 layers of heavy cardboard which I covered w/ aluminum foil.
We did the bottom layer and held it up with coffee cups.
Here is the view from the back. After this dries we will add the roof.
