After dinner each family decorated their gingerbread house. There was some major creativity happening from the kids. They all worked very intently and made the houses look really great. It absolutely made it seem more like Christmas around here. The absence of cold weather and snow tend not to give off the Christmas vibe.
I am not sure if you noticed that I left out the part about the construction of the homes. There is a reason for that. When we opened up the kits the day before everyone came over we saw that each of the kits had broken walls and/or roofs. I am not sure if this happened prior to our buying them or when we hand-carried them home with us, but never the less we needed to do some repair work.
The broken gingerbread would not be something that icing would fix so we needed to find a little stronger bonding agent. Enter: the hot glue gun. Kathi took to the remodeling much like Bob Villa attacks "This Old House" and in no time the pieces were ready to be used for construction; minus the fact that they were no longer edible and they were not as structurally sound as before.
Fast-forward to the day of the dinner and I was tasked with constructing all three houses while Kathi and the kids took in a movie in beautiful downtown PKU. I started with the hot glue gun since it had worked so magically before, not to mention the moisture in the air here makes the icing harder to work with because it doesn't harden as quickly. The problem with the hot glue for construction was that the glue kept drying too fast when you needed to apply large amounts. This meant that I was going to have to make icing for the construction and hope for it to work.
I took to making Royal Icing (as I found out it is called. I love the internet.) It was pretty easy to make which was good. The bad part was that it took a lot of it to make all three houses. It took me 2 and a half hours, and several more reconstructions to get them all together. I thought that it took a long time to do but that it was not too difficult. However when Kathi came home she asked me what happened as she saw me covered in powdered sugar and dried icing all over my shirt and pants. I told her all went well and that all the great bakers get a little messy. I am not sure she bought it.
There was a difference in quality of construction for each one. One was like the little gingerbread man who lived in the gated community, one was constructed like it was in a nice sub-division and then there was the one that looked like it was straight out of the projects. That was to be the Getzinger home. Hope you like the pictures!
We bought local candy to use for decorations. There was one particular type which smelled like stinky feet. No one would eat it after smelling it but Brooklyn. She said it tasted really good. We took her at her word.
Check out Santa coming out of the chimney. Hudson made that out of a gingerbread man. Quite a talented young artist.
Our array of candy decorations.
The weight of the decorations caused the Ghetto Home to collapse.
The finished products.
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