Gingerbread House

I've struggled to find time to bake recently (explanations to follow in due course) so I thought I would re-hash an old creation of mine.

About 10 months ago, my blood, sweat and tears went into baking a gingerbread house in honour of baby girl’s first Christmas.  It was such a harrowing experience that almost a year has past and I still cannot bring myself to destroy the gingerbread house!

Baby girl would only have been around 4 weeks when I decided to embark on this mammoth task and anyone with a 4 week old baby will know exactly how wrecked you feel ALL the time, so embarking on a project such as this is really the last thing you would want to be doing!

Clearly, sleep deprivation had led me to not think straight as I seemed to have forgotten my last experience at baking a gingerbread house.  It was about 5 years ago that I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I baked a gingerbread house for my niece’s birthday having absolutely no idea how involved it would be.  Having spent two days baking and decorating it, and also having used Pythagoras’ theorem for designing the tepee shaped house (who would have thought that would ever have come in handy, seriously who?), I said to myself, NEVER again! Particularly after the soul crushing experience of having my niece and her friends rip into the gingerbread house in a matter of seconds, leaving it to look like the aftermath of a hurricane (what was I expecting from 7 year olds - admiration from a safe distance? Yeah right)!

So with a bout of amnesia, off I went.  After SEVEN days, the gingerbread house was complete! The seven days consisted of firstly getting out the ruler and pen to measure a house, then baking two lots of gingerbread (I stupidly halved the recipe and then realised I required the FULL recipe - duh), and then about 5 days of decorating all while in a zombie like state. Needless to say, I was well and truly over it by the time I finished it!  

However, with the memories no longer so raw, I forget about all the pain that went into it and it makes me think that just like child birth, I could perhaps do this again!

As my piping skills weren’t great, I had to pipe and re-pipe the writing on the plaque so you can see the smears across it!

I must credit C as he designed the love heart made from musk sticks.

The back of the house.  The musk stick picket fence was also C's creation!

One side of the house. 

This was the last of the walls to complete and by this stage I just wanted to finish the darn thing and so I opted for the quickest solution and stuck two candy canes to the wall.  I ended up liking this side best!

 So what do you do with leftover gingerbread dough? Make gingerbread men of course!