Our Gingerbread House

My post today has absolutely nothing to do with stamping or card making. Today's post is about Gingerbread Houses, although we used graham crackers to make ours. I thought I'd start off by showing you some pictures we took of the Gingerbread Houses at the Biltmore Hotel.

Each house was a replica of famous buildings like the Arizona Gammage

The Guggenheim Art Museum

A replica of the historic state capitol building in Prescott.

My favorite was this one, a traditional Gingerbread House.

Here's another house that was on display. It's different...I like the water effect.

Back to our Gingerbread House project ....the Gingerbread House has become a tradition that my son, aka Uncle Daniel, does with Adriel's kids every year.

This year was a little more involved as they drew up house plans, made a serious candy run to the dollar store, and figured out the best tool for cutting windows, doors and roofs out of the graham crackers.

With the planning stage behind them they dove into cutting and assembling their house. The kids made furniture while Daniel assembled the house structure.

The veranda on the second story includes a hot tub, filled with blue bubble gum for the water.

Kayla made a snow penguin...and candy bananas are strategically hidden throughout the house. Why???

 Since the assembling took several hours, we saved the decorating for the next day. If you didn't know it, the best part about decorating the Gingerbread House is getting to eat all the candy. Some of the candy made it on the house, but I think a lot of it got eaten.

 I was in charge of the Gingerbread icing and I discovered a great Eggless Royal Icing recipe from Food.com. Did you know this is what Gingerbread icing is called? I sure didn't. This eggless recipe is great because if you eat the candy off of the house, you don't have to worry about getting salmonella from the eggs. I thought I'd share the recipe here, just in case anyone out there decides to make a Gingerbread House with Royal Icing.

Eggless Royal Icing

Ingredients:

1 cup confectioner's sugar
2 teaspoons water or milk
3 teaspoons light corn syrup

Directions:

1.  In a small bowl, stir together confectioner's sugar and water or milk until smooth.
2. Add corn syrup until icing is smooth and glossy. If icing is too thick, add more corn syrup.
3. Keep icing covered with damp cloth when not using to prevent crusting

We just used a ziplock bag for squeezing out our icing by snipping off a small corner piece, filling the bag with icing. We rolled the bag up and squeezed the icing through the corner hole and it worked great. You could certainly use a pastry bag and tips for a more professional and cleaner look. This icing works great...it's super sticky, it held all our candy onto the graham cracker walls, it was pliable enough to squeeze and it made great icicles, plus it dries like a rock. For the roof we thinned the icing down with a few drops of water and spread it over the roof, then we sprinkled crushed hard peppermint candies over it and let it dry. (This was Kayla's great idea :-)
Thanks for stopping by!