Gingerbread House- Part 3

I had to re bake the broken pieces of the steeple, but I fixed it! The hard part was getting the broken pieces off after the icing had dried. Lightly run a knife with a serrated edge over the icing until it breaks away. I made the new parts a little thicker too so they would be harder to break this time. I scraped off all of the dried icing and attached the new steeple sides. When I glued my steeple front to one of the sides, I set them on their sides leaning against the building to give them a chance to dry without gravity being a jerk.

I had noticed from my first attempt to build the steeple that the front is a little shorter than the rest of it, so before I placed it, I slid some halved spice drops underneath it so that it could be as tall as the rest of the steeple, and so that the spire isn't crooked. Now that my mistake is fixed and I have a fully built gingerbread cathedral, it's time to decorate.

While I was working on rebuilding, I gave my daughter some ice cream cones and asked her to frost them. She happily took on this task, and took every opportunity to sneak some frosting, but in the end she had five frosted ice cream cones that were set aside to be used as extra decoration. I have seen some of these trees where they used piping tips to make the trees look as realistic as possible. I had my six year old coat them with a butter knife and they still looked very much like Christmas trees, and she was thrilled to be able to help.

I bought a varied assortment of candy that I thought would work well, but somehow still found myself indecisive about how to start. My issue was trying to figure out where I wanted everything to go. After looking at a few different pictures and getting some ideas, I knew that I wanted to use spice drops for my roof. I had originally wanted necco wafers, but I couldn't find them or anything close enough for my liking. I have seen some pretty neat ideas about how to do the roof, including cereal, sour patch strips, and even saw some where they cut into the raw dough to make the roof pattern. But my desire to have a brightly colored house overruled everything else. Of course, I had to make a rainbow pattern because I couldn't just place them randomly. It took three small bags of spice drops to fill up the roof, using frosting (from a tub) to hold it in place.

I really did like the idea of drawing shingles on with icing, so when I was trying to figure out what to do with the spire, it was really the only option that made sense to me. I filled a piping bag with frosting, and just made rows of half circles that kind of looked like shingles. I did notice that when I went faster and just went with it, it looked better than when I moved slowly and tried to be precise.

I left the rest of the house alone and moved to the ground. I covered the entire front and side of the cardboard sheet with frosting. I used peppermint swirls to make a small path, and placed the trees in the rest of the blank spaces. I used some chocolate bridge mix as rocks placed up against buildings, and finally I covered everything with with and blue snowflake sprinkles. I let my daughter do the sprinkles and she also helped place the spice drops on the roof.

After a few moments of panic, and telling myself that there was no way I would ever be able to finish, I actually did it. I know I say that a lot, but this was bigger and more ambitious than I have been in a while. My kitchen was destroyed, my kids kept stealing my candy, and I don't know what were going to do with this giant gingerbread cathedral. It was totally worth it though.

We are exploring the different methods for making snowflakes next week.