The 2009 gingerbread house

Happy 2010! I finally have some pictures of our gingerbread house to post. I decided to make a gingerbread Victorian house, modeled after a real house that's just a few blocks from Generous Servings. Here's a photoessay of the construction:

First I made a small cardboard model, then a scale model that I could disassemble and use as templates to cut the gingerbread slabs.

I cut holes in the wall pieces for windows and filled them with crushed Lifesavers, then put them back in the oven to melt the candy and make "stained glass". After the gingerbread pieces were cut out, I left them out to harden for a few days.

I made the curved parts of the house out of pastillage, a sugar and gelatin dough that can be cut and shaped and then dries hard enough to support a fair amount of weight. This picture shows a cut-out of one wall piece. The large pieces for the towers were molded around Quaker Oats containers, big tin cans, and a styrofoam bell I found at a craft store.

I glued all the pieces together, in stages, with royal icing. I left the walls for a few days to make sure they were sturdy enough to hold up the roof and decorations.

About ten days after I started, we were ready to decorate. Most of the decoration was finished in one long night. I am proud of the utilization of candy on this house--I personally believe that it's a cop-out to decorate a gingerbread house completely in royal icing. The part that took the longest was the coffee bean roof tiling. Jill and I worked on that for many hours. There's always one boring part of this type of project, which you get about 10% done with and realize you never should have started, and the coffee bean roof was that part. The chimney is made of Boston baked beans candy, which is one of those candies you would never notice unless you were standing in the candy aisle scrutinizing every variety for building material potential. The people at the grocery store must have thought I had very eclectic taste in candy.

And here are some pictures of the final creation:

This isn't as good a picture, but it shows my favorite feature of the house, the weathervane.

The door mat has an authentic "fuzzy" texture because it's the inside face of one of those weird spongy sandwich cookies (also used on the top and bottom of each window). I couldn't fit "Welcome", so it just says "Hello".