Gingerbread House-Part 2

My daughter's class is doing gingerbread houses this week too! Theirs are the more age appropriate graham cracker houses, but she was telling me (with lots of flapping and bouncing) that she gets to build a house too. I have already promised her that she gets to help with decorating, and we have special sprinkles just for her, but I'm glad she has one that is just hers.

So, today we begin the assembly of our gingerbread house. Before we get to that, I wanted to show you what to do with the shapes with have windows. It has become much more well known in recent years, but the first time I made this with my dad the idea of candy stained glass windows was new and so much fun.

I got a large bag of jolly ranchers candy and sorted them by color. In the bag I got was pink, red, green, blue, and purple. I took 8-10 of each color and places them in small bowls. One color at a time I placed them in a coffee grinder until they turned into a fine powder. There were still some large chunks left in the grinder but it's easy to set them aside.

Before baking, I placed small scoops of powder to the windows, trying to get a variety of colors and patterns. Fill the space as much as you can without going over the edge of the dough. Too little of the powder and the windows will be too thin and could easily break, too much and it bubbles over the sides while baking.

Bake as you normally would, at 350* for 8-10 minutes. It will bubble as it takes, but as long as it's not too full it won't bubble over the side. I slightly overfilled my front steeple windows, but it still looks fine. I did still have some extra powder left over. You can save it in case a piece breaks (I had two break) or you can use them to make some stained glass sugar cookies.

I let those cool down overnight, and the next morning I began to assemble my house. I found a great recipe for icing glue here, which I prepared and scooped into a piping bag. I started by grabbing the front, back, and side pieces, and I iced them together at the sides. As I attached each piece, I iced it on both sides to make sure that it's secure. Because this was the foundation for the entire house and I know that not being patient can cause the whole house to collapse, I literally just held the base together as the pieces dried. Even then, I had the edges moving on me slightly and I kept having to adjust and fix the walls until they felt solid enough for me to be able to let go. At this point I used a little icing at the base to secure the house to the cardboard.

Even after it dried enough to let go, I still let it set a little bit longer before I tried attaching the roof. One at a time, I placed both pieces of the roof, with the little grooves toward the center to leave a gap for the steeple.

At this point I noticed that my back wall was sliding and I had to readjust it or else stuff would fall over. After fixing it, I held my roof pieces in place as they dried. I considered this the hard part, but I was mistaken. The steeple us where I ran into trouble.

As I was trying to assemble the steeple, both of my sides cracked and I will have to either re-bake them, or try to glue them together. Either way, I will show you the final results in part three for now, let me explain how the pieces are supposed to go.

First, glue the sides of the steeple to the front steeple piece with the large ends up. When it is mostly dry, place the steeple on the front of the house, setting the steeple between the groove in the roof. If the gap is too small you can use a knife to make it fit. Ice the sides to attach it to the house. The short piece with the V shape is the back of the steeple, and you can glue that on now as well. Now, you can either glue your triangles together to make the spire before or after you attach it to the steeple. The only downside to doing it before is that you can't guarantee you made it the right shape to fit on top.

Once you get the top of that steeple on, you are done with the assembly and you are ready to decorate. I am going to try to fix what broke and I will let you know how I fixed it and see the final results.