Gingerbread Mania

For the last several years I have tried to have a tradition of decorating a gingerbread house for my children.  We usually have one or two that I have found a good deal on and we share sides to decorate the house...though admittedly my children balk at having to share their creative designs with siblings.  And we never actually eat the gingerbread part of the house because it is hard as a rock, and just yuck after it comes from the store.  I just never gave any thought to making my own as I was sure it was a daunting task, and who has time for that, right? 

Okay, so I have to say that it was because of a good friend that I decided to try this out.  My friend and I were chatting and she mentioned that she had to bake the gingerbread for her children's annual gingerbread baking day...bake it?  (you mean as in do-it-yourself???)  I can't pull the old, I have too many kids for that one, because she has the same number of littles as I do!  I was a bit intrigued so I asked her and she told me that she had actually learned from yet another one of our friends (also a mama to 5) hmmmm....I'm going to have to try, afterall, if they can all do it.  Well, you get the picture.

I started by asking for the recipie and all the details and my friend was ever gracious.  It seems her husband (a talented woodworker) even went so far as to make her a mold of sorts to use for this annual day.  Oh, and she makes each of her children a house of thier own to decorate...yeah, I'm going to have to do that now too.  So, here is the mold my friend lent me.  Mold may not be the correct word but it isn't exactly a cookie cutter either.

The two slats are to gauge thickness and the templates are to lay on top of the dough and cut around.  Pretty ingenious of her hubby, huh?

I did the baking the night before.  This is where I had one of those "WHAT WAS I THINKING?" moments.  As I was baking I thought to myself, this isn't so bad, its kind of easy...what if I just let each of the older children invite a friend.  Famous last words.  Each of the recipie batches made me almost 2 houses, so since I now needed 7 houses, it was a long evening.  But, in the end it all worked out and I was pretty pleased with the end result, as were my children because afterall...isn't it much more fun to overdose on sugar with friends???

This was the helper I had about the time I had that "WHAT WAS I THINKING?" moment... He was pretending that the slats were train tracks and the flour was snow...much to my chagrin.

The next morning, before breakfast even, we decided we had better glue the houses together with the icing so that when friends arrived the houses would be set and ready for decorating.  I must say I was impressed with the "glue" it worked way better than the stuff that is in those Wilton decorating kit houses that are ready made.  (I always have ended up using hot glue to get those to stay together...I mean the kids didn't actually eat them so it was okay, right?)

I had some errands to run before friends arrived so we stopped by our local dollar store to stock up on some candy for the houses.  The candy set me back about $10 and when I added up all my ingredients I think this activity came in at under $20 for all 7 houses with candy, icing, etc.  I figure $3 a house is not too bad!

Here was our set up, my 3 y/o got to jump start his early so that he could nap during the older kid's festivities.

Then the friends came and creativity took flight.  These houses turned out AMAZING!

I think we just started a new tradition...