Gingerbread House Construction Party #2

I love it when Christmas baking season rolls around each year! There is something so special about being in the kitchen covered in flour – singing along to Christmas music – baking sweet things for people who I love. I look forward to it all year! And this year I had two new traditions to look forward to. My fabulous sister and I planned (and executed!) a long weekend get away to the Sweetest Place on Earth at the beginning of December where we stocked up on specialty baking products – like sea salt caramel chips and mint chocolate chips – and otherwise had a grand time. Right on the heels of that weekend, my really good friend and her crew planned a Gingerbread House Construction Party, which was a wonderfully good time despite the first snow of the season.

A Quick Recap of What Went Down Last Year

In 2016, we had three tries at a Gingerbread House Construction Party. I had made three batches of gluten free gingerbread dough from a Danielle Walker advance reader copy for my Holiday Dessert Party in mid-December, but time was too tight for me to bake that into a house so I gave it to my really good friend as a parting gift. We first decided to schedule our party for New Year’s Eve, but got distracted by the festivities and never got around to constructing the houses. So we decided to schedule for the following weekend, but got walloped by a grand snowstorm and had to reschedule again to the following weekend. So we made fresh dough for that weekend and had a fantastic time. My house was pretty plain, but cute.

Preparing for This Year’s Gingerbread House Construction Party

Before Thanksgiving, my really good friend booked my calendar for the second weekend of December as the date for this season’s Gingerbread House Construction Party. Lesson learned from last year: we wanted to do it before the snow kicked in! Of course, this time the only help my really good friend wanted from me was an email with the recipes for the gluten free dough and the royal icing. She didn’t even want me to bring candy for decorations to the party!

Of course, what happened the morning of the Gingerbread House Construction Party? It started snowing!!! We were forecasted to have three to six inches of accumulation across twelve or so hours; therefore, I didn’t think it would be too challenging to leave the house and drive on the roads. Especially since it was pretty much all main roads between our two houses.

Since I was inspired by the gingerbread house that my sister and I had seen on our trip, I stopped to pick up a few different types of candies to complete my vision: candy canes, white peppermint kisses, chocolate bars, red licorice. While I was trying to find the regular candy, I found sugar snowflakes and sugar gingerbread men (or women in pants as I called them!) I even found a super cute Ninjabread cookie cutter set that made for the perfect hostess gift – especially since she already had the Already Been Chewed Gingerbread Men cookie cutter set who would make the perfect victims!


The Party Itself

When I arrived at the house a little after 11am, the crew had almost everything already prepped. My really good friend had been up past midnight baking the pieces for the houses, and had then organized by type in covered aluminum trays. She also had made special cardboard and aluminum bases for the houses so that we could transport them easily when necessary. She had just finished up a monstrous batch of buttercream frosting when I walked into the kitchen and was about to start on the royal icing needed to cement together the pieces of the houses. So I helped the rest of the crew in the dining room organize the candies into bowls so that we all had a better idea of what was available.

Once the royal icing was finished, the actual construction begun. The royal icing was loaded into an automatic dispenser, that the crew kept telling our gentleman that it was just like a caulking gun. Of course, when it was handed to me, I completely had no idea what to do with it because I’m not familiar with caulking guns! I gripped in the most awkward fashion, and had it taken away from me so that I could be shown the proper way to hold it. Eventually, I got the hang of it and got my pieces “caulked” so that they would stand up and stick together. I didn’t do the neatest job, but I knew that there would be buttercream frosting and candy decorations to cover up my mess.

I had a very clear vision of my roof design: I wanted to tile it with squares from the chocolate bar. Of course, rather than sticking entire chocolate bars to the roof and trying to line up the seams, I painstakingly broke each chocolate bar into squares and then stuck each square onto the rook using buttercream frosting. Before I was finished, the roof had gotten so heavy with chocolate that it slid from its original location and left a gap at the roofline! Bright blue buttercream to the rescue!!! For the roofline, I used the white peppermint kisses, with two mini peanut butter cups stacked on top of each other as a chimney. I accented the roof with a few of the pretty powder blue sugar snowflakes that I had picked up in my quest for normal candy.

And just like last year, my creativity petered out once I finished the roof! This year my really good friend had carved a door and windows into the house – last year we had to add our own with candy – so I set about accenting those with blue buttercream and blue M&Ms. Then I added a line of green buttercream to simulate grass in front of the house and stuck a super cute gingerbread woman in pants at the doorway. That was the extent of my creativity!

Fortunately, my village kicked in to help me gussy up the front of my house. I sent a photo to an awesome friend on her last days in Utah, and she suggested I add a hedgerow of white gumdrops. We only had red or green gumdrops, so I used the green ones and accented them with a little more green buttercream. I sent a photo to my fabulous sister, and she suggested shutters or a flower box. So I stuck a piece of chocolate in each window, piped on some green frosting, and stuck in some purple nerds candies. Ta da! Flower boxes! I added a giant powder blue sugar snowflake over the doorway, and stopped work on the front of the house.

Since I had tapped out both my own creativity and my village, I spread the back roof with brown buttercream and decided that was all I was going to do on the rest of the house. I was pretty pleased with myself. Of course, the gentleman and the crew were super creative and festive with their houses. One house had a gummi dinosaur eating birdseed from a tree stump. Another house had Peeps snowmen with top hats. That same house had a fire pit in the backyard. My really good friend’s house was a tropical bungalow, with a gorgeous Christmas tree in the backyard. And our gentleman’s house was a classic beauty!

The Verdict

This year’s Gingerbread House Construction Party was a rousing success thanks to all the work that my really good friend put into making the house pieces, the buttercream, and the royal icing. I was really just along for the ride, which was a lot of fun. Of course, the one thing she would like to do differently next year is try her hand at a non-gluten free gingerbread recipe instead of the gluten free one that we’ve used for the past two years. The gluten free recipe is fragile and requires baking on parchment paper, which takes extra time. But it definitely tastes great!