Gingerbread House

 Every year during the holidays, I bake a gingerbread house and decorate it with lots of different candy. These are pictures of the gingerbread house I made last year. I made the typical royal icing that I use to decorate sugar cookies with, but found it to be much too thin. I thickened up the icing by adding an extra cup and a half of icing sugar and it was much easier to work with.

For the gingerbread, I used the Gingerbread Snowflake recipe from my Martha Stewart Cookies

book.

To keep things simple, I place gummy bears and gingerbread people in little groups around the house and a few trees here and there to fill up the extra space on the icing covered cakeboard I used as a base.

I used candy coated chocolate which look like rocks (found at my local bulk food store) to form a path to the door of the gingerbread house.  I piped green icing stars onto jujubes and used them as bushes. The snowman is made of gingerbread as well. I was sure to roll a few pieces of gingerbread dough into little balls and baked them along with the gingerbread house, so that I could cover them with white icing and form a snowman.

Overall, this is a simple gingerbread house, but I had a lot of fun baking and putting it together.