Gingerbread houses and Xmas cookies

Dec 2014

The best cookie

Here are our gingerbread parts

So Katie says, lets make gingerbread houses from scratch!  I have never done it before, so I had to get complicated and try 3 different recipes.  The amount of flour is so variable and we ended up not even making an exact recipe.  But for the record, the best was out of Lucky Peach, using buttermilk and the key is the stickiness of the dough.  For us the amount of flour was on the very low end, so I think next year we can get through the making of the parts much faster.

I made the first one with the neighbor boys.  I frosted the parts

then made them hold up the walls while I glued it together with frosting.

They decorated-just dip the candy in frosting and stick it on.

This is Typewriters side.

This is Loggys front.  It comes with an elaborate story about how it is sad because it's girlfriend is dating a jerk (I did not make this up!).

Some trees and a gumdrop sled!

Meanwhile I made a new batch of Buhdda's Hand candy-here it is all cut up and smelling fantastic!

The second one I make with J&K.  We didn't cut out doors, but I think next year we can try after it is baked.

Note to self, dots are too heavy, marshmallows are good!

Out of the three batches of dough we got enough for 2 houses, but then extra, so we tried for trees.

The Katie and Sue tree is all about the colors!  Blue

Purple (those are pink dinosaurs on the bottom)

Green!

John opted for a traditional all green tree.

I also had to make a batch of cookies and we frosted with the extra from the houses, not my usual but oh well!

E- makes the most of the colors

fun combos

You can see we were finally running out of frosting-but they are so cute!

Happy holidays everyone!