Gingerbread Houses

Since no family was coming to visit this Christmas I had to take the gingerbread house making into my own hands.  This was a huge project and one that I will do again in the future with a few MAJOR changes...

 1. Start the process a week in advance. The dough recipe is enough for 2 houses and I wanted to make 4.  I found out pretty quick that my mixer only likes one batch at a time.  The other reason to start in advance is because it requires several rounds of chilling and cooling throughout the process and I don't have that many pans.

2. Cut the notches about twice the size as the cookie cutter cuts them. When I tried to fit all the puzzle piece shapes together most of the notches were too small.   This leads to great frustration and breaking pieces.

AND

3. Have someone to help you put them together. One person to hold the piece and one to put the glue like frosting on so that it will actually stay together.

After one miserable attempt at putting a house together with frosting by myself I pulled out the Hot Glue Gun!  I figured people don't usually eat the house anyways.  This recipe that came with the houses actually tastes good so I made a bunch of gingerbread men that could be eaten in place of the hot glued houses.

 All-in-all it was a blast. I really enjoyed decorating our house and eating the candy. Hunter was amused for a while and helped but mostly wanted to play with the other kids( and sample the candy of coarse). We had two families, the Sponsellers and Waters,  come and join us but somehow we only got pictures of us (man I hate that when I check the camera afterwards and realize I didn't get all the shots I wanted). 

Here is our finished product... complete with marshmallow snowman and candy train. Grandma and Grandpa Slocombe donated some cedar plank, that are used for cooking salmon on the grill, they were the perfect size and shape for our A-frame gingerbread houses.

It was a lot of work but something I will still look forward to doing in the future.  Everyone had a great time, hot glued houses and all, and I will look back at this post next year when I somehow forget how huge the process of making gingerbread houses really is.