Gingerbread House Challenge 2009

this is our version of the Victorian Farmhouse

My brother had a contest at work to make a gingerbread house. He had asked me for help and I of course said yes. The criteria was that it had to be made from edible parts, it could be made from a kit but not a pre-made house, or you can make it yourself. So we decided to make it ourselves. We don't do things out of a box anymore (unless we are short on time and HAVE to get something together) - everything's made from scratch. So we started one weekend prior to the weekend it was due. Buying all the ingredients - I made the gingerbread dough, while he cut out the template.

Then later in the week to the nights prior to judging, it was crunch time to put everything together. Making the shingles from mint chocolate (melted then cooled), the snow was white fondant (my first time playing with fondant - I was not good at it), the windows were not coming out well - making them out of sugar, and to bind it we used chocolate. We got that trick from watching Food Network's Gingerbread Challenge. It's a good tip. Martha Stewart's tip is to use melted sugar but I don't know how long that would take to cool; where the chocolate, you can cool it faster.

taken from the cover of the book we got - the actual Victorian Farmhouse plan

We didn't get everything we wanted to in our plan - a snowman, trees made of rice krispies, or even snow on the ground, but it was a good effort. Next year, we might go smaller with the size. I want to make this gingerbread house that's made with cake.. we'll see.