The Gingerbread House

As a child I always wondered how people made those Gingerbread Houses and I thought they were really cool. Well, now that I have a child of my own, the Christmas season makes you revisit things from your childhood. This year Calloway begged for us to make a Gingerbread House. So we went to Kroger and bought a kit. We thought it'd be the perfect thing to take to North Carolina for us to do together with Roselyn, especially since she has a knack for decorating cakes. Unfortunately, we forgot to take it with us! So fast forward to when we return home and Cal sees the kit sitting on the kitchen counter, of course, she wants us to do it with her.

So last Saturday, January 7th we sat down around 3-4pm to begin working on the Gingerbread House.

Little did we know that it takes about 5-6 hours to actually do one of these things! But we stuck it out! Oh, the things you do for the little people in your life. So, below you can see that we've got the four walls glued (iced) together, it must sit this way for an hour before you can glue on the roof. 

An hour later, the roof goes on, and then you wait 2-3 hours to let the icing completely harden before you begin piling on all of the decorations. 

So, being the Type A (control freak) person that I am, I decided to sit down and divy up all of the candy for each part of the house, so that each side got equal colors/sizes/shapes/etc. Luckily I had these wonderful little glass 1 cup bowls from Pampered Chef.

Here's Mark making icycles hanging off of the roof.....he did ALL of the icing.

He has a much steadier hand than I. 

Here you can see the princess taste testing each of the candies while Mark decorates the side of the house. (*I only let her eat the odd candies, you know, the ones that didn't come out even for each side of the house, the extras I guess you could say.) 

Here we are working on the top of the roof. 

And one side of the roof completed. 

Here's the completed project around 8:45pm (we didn't wait the full 2-3 hours!). 

Here's a closer up picture of the rooftop so that you can see the design we did. 

And the finished front. 

It was so late when we finished that they had to wait until the next day to eat it!

I didn't really partake because the icing was too rich and it just didn't appeal to me at all! 

I can add that to the list of things I've done and will probably never do again! It turned out cute but 1) it took forever and 2) it wasn't worth the time, energy, and effort!

I will say it gave me so great memories and fun times as a whole family!