Sentiments a la Stack: Ginger Bread 2009

As I finally sit down to review all the pictures that I took in the last year, it occurred to me, how terrible I've been at blogging. FOR SHAME!!

There is some gold in last year...and as I never DID get around to finishing my year book...I'll site technical difficulties...it's about time I caught up.

Over the Christmas Holidays, nearly 3 months ago, my folks came to visit and we absolutely did some of the things that have become tradition...for instance, our yearly Gingerbread offering...(remember 2008).

This year, we...ehem, I...was VERY ambitious. Grandma had bought us a kit, in the hope (I'm sure) that I wouldn't make her try to build another one (Silly Grandma).

I had EVERY intention of building another...and what was fabulous about the kit that grandma bought is that I could STEAL the pattern from already existent cookies...ni-ice. What's more, this particular kit had a gable situation that made it easier to stabilize the roof during the drying of the cement (I mean royal icing).

OOOOOooo, what a lovely house we would create...but first, I had to try my chops at cookies...I'd read a post on another blog that talked about pre-painting sugar cookies with kids, seemed like a great idea...so we gave that a whirl.

Here is the mess part of the sugar and gingy cookies...

And here are the girls painting the cookies. As you view the pictures on this post, I would draw your attention to Monkey-Face. Who knew, when I dubbed her Monkey-Face back in 2005, how TRUE the name would remain well into her fourth year...prophetic, I tell ya...

And here are the fruits of our labor...I somehow failed to get a picture of them all laid out. Bubba and my dad pretty much ate them all over the course of the month of December. The verdict being that the sugar cookies (the painted ones) were okay...but the gingies were REALLY good. Which was just fabulous in my mind, because now, I thought, I had an awesome Gingerbread House recipe...

Now as the day of the DECORATION loomed in, our recollection of the chaos of trying to set up last year's house came to the forefront. Grandma and I remembered how UNhappy the little girls were to wait for the house to dry before they could decorate. So we decided to get the business part of the houses taken care of during quiet time a few days before the big day.

Here is the kit house...it went together SO easy. Once we had it together, we stuck it in a perfect little shoe box to dry and then completely forgot to make the other one until the day before we were supposed to be decorating it. Yeah, not so good.

Here is the one we made...it DID NOT go together so easy...it wanted to break and buckle. I'm positive it's because I rolled it too thin...or maybe because I used the COOKIE recipe...I don't know...but hmmm...it was slightly less that perfect...but VERY tasty. When all the votes came in (you know there were 7 of us) it was well decided that although the kit house really stayed together, the homemade house was so yummy we pretty much ate the whole thing. That really was a vote in it's favor...so much less to throw away!!

Now if you look you'll notice the gable situation on the front and back of the house...the ORIGINAL kit house only had the gable on the front. But it was SO handy holding up the roof while it dried, on my copy I put a gable on the front and back...but, well see...I didn't take into account the roof needing to be shorter to take into account the gable section. So when I put that back roof on, it overlapped the front by 1/2 inch. "No worries," said I and whipped out my handy dandy serrated knife. And it actually WORKED...I was indeed able to shorten that roof. However, there was a structural issue with the thickness of the roof and in the midst of moving it back and forth, it split right down the center.

Not a terrible tragedy...we decided it was a sun-roof. The bigger problem came later when we discovered that the front roof also had the same issue....you'll see.

And then we decorated...BOY HOWDY, did we decorate...

There were concerns ALL through the decorating of the homemade house...for one thing we'd only given it a couple hours to set up before decorating...the kit house sat for about 3 days...the homemade house only about 3-4 hours...

We used MANY fingers to hold it up...We also used many fingers to POINT out issues....

Eventually we knew for certain that the roof was not going to make it without some SERIOUS help...

But we did finish them...and as much as the pictures don't show it, we laughed a lot at our predicament. And you can tell that the WHOLE family was in there because there are actually pictures of ME in there!! I don't think we'd win any prizes but it really was so much fun...

Needing a caption for this one, we thought and thought. Bubba thinks it should be "Location Location Location"...and an old friend who grew up to be a real estate agent suggested that one is "welcoming" and the other is "newly remodeled"