To give you some background, we attended a couple of these events before we moved to North Carolina and ended up revolutionizing the whole idea. The first year we went, we fully intended on making the standard pitched-roof, frosting-covered, candy-decorated gingerbread cottage. However, one of our pieces broke and we had to improvise. We made a flat-roofed Florida house, complete with pink walls, a window swamp cooler, and pool. That triggered Joe and Michele's creative juices, and they've haven't done a simple gingerbread cottage since. Others have gotten in on the act, and now it's anything goes on gingerbread construction day.
This year we had the idea to do a village of mini-houses, because they'd be easier to put together and decorate. We didn't know how much Harvey wrangling we'd need to do, so we wanted our idea to be fairly simple. Then Heather had a flash of genius. We'd still make mini-houses. But we added this:
Gingergiant was born!
We baked all of the pieces the night before, including the gingergiant. He's about a foot tall. We used frosting to mortar him to a dowel we brought with us, which was then secured to the base with a screw.
The houses are gingerbread, but their roofs are graham crackers. We miscalculated the roof size when we made them, so the ones we made didn't fit. The snow is frosting, of course. The trees are gummy peppermint leaves. The paths to the doors are made of tiny, candy-coated chocolate kisses bordered by sections of Twizzler Pull-n-Peel. The rubble is broken gingerbread, and dried vegetable bits we found at the bulk food store. Here are some more shots.
If you click on the pictures and visit the flickr pages, you can see bigger versions of the pictures and see a bit more of the detail. There's also some additional commentary from me there.
We had a blast and we're looking forward to next year.
6 comments:
That is the most creative gingerbread village I've ever seen. It's pretty funny too. So what did Joe and Michelle do?
As Kurt's loving wife, I'd like to be the first to identify that our self-appointed grammar policeman himself had a misspelling in his very first sentence. I'm sure if he had written a shorter post he would have noticed that it is "annual" not "anual". Oh how the mighty have fallen.
That is the most creative gingerbread village I've seen, it was wonderful! I've never made my own gingerbread before, did yours end up tasting as good as it looked?
Thanks, Heather, for catching Kurt as his own game. We're looking foward to seeing you all in less than 2 weeks!
Kurt needs a hobby! Obviously, he isn't getting enough of a challenge at work.
Spelling error corrected. Thank you.
The gingerbread is not for eating. It is only for building.
Joe and Michele did a mobile home on blocks (candy Legos!), and in front was a monster truck with donuts as tires.
Did you get pictures of Joe's gingerbread house too? It's sounds pretty funny. With all the things that are made into candy now-a-days I bet you can get pretty creative. Are you guys already planning for next year?
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