My Second Favorite Holiday Tradition

Last week I shared with you our first holiday tradition: our advent calendar. This week we finished our second holiday tradition, constructing gingerbread houses. This is our fourth year making our houses from scratch and it was exciting as always. We have used the King Arthur Flour recipe every time and it makes the best construction gingerbread. For those of you who haven't made your own gingerbread houses, construction gingerbread is neither tasty nor soft. It basically bakes up like really good smelling cardboard. That's a good thing, you want strong walls to hold all of the candy you will be putting on. The recipe comes with a house template but we like to make our own. This year we were really ambitious (perhaps to our detriment). I chose to make a model of our house and Daniel designed a Tahitian stilt house.

The first step for construction was making our template. It helps to see how it will all go together if you are making anything intricate.

Kitty decided she wanted to help too, much to Daniel's amusement.

 Thanks Honey Bunch.

Normally house making goes pretty smoothly. This year however we both hit a few snags...

Needless to say Daniel's original design plans fell through (as did his roof and a few walls). Like the candy cane brace in the back?

I had a few mishaps as well but basically pulled though in the end. I didn't manage to get the overhang on the roof right but otherwise it is fairly close to what the top level of our house looks like only much shorter (and minus the candy of course).

I even included the covered front porch, painted floor and all. What house would be complete without two little gingerbread residents?

And a secret peek inside- our Christmas tree in the front room.

Even if there were a few flops this year it is still a great tradition. We made up some mulled wine and spent the day with quite the candy high. All in all, I call it a success!

Cheers!