Gingerbread House Extravaganza!

Royal Icing and Gobs Of Candy Delighting!

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Once again, I fell off the face of the Earth, or at least the dangling backspaces and ampersands that make up Steemit. Perhaps I should say that I fell face first into multiple globules of royal icing. Er, rather that royal icing was slathered all over the back of my hair by a five month old infant. And there I go, getting ahead of myself again.

Really, the only time I am absent from Steemit is when my life gets more hectic than a Costco store during the first of the month. For some reason, I have been surrounded by ill people, and have spent more than a fair amount of time being a modern day Balto retrieving people's meds and trying to spread get well cheer. It just seems important.

However, the siren song that is blog posting has been calling to my creative impulses like mad. Whipping up a post has been gnawing at the back of my subconscious like a rabid coyote in a KFC kitchen. Or something. Even today, I do not have scads of time, yet I just can't take it anymore and decided to regale you all with pictures of the gingerbread houses that a bunch of us made this past Sunday.

Ever year my dear friend Tina bakes up multiple gingerbread house pieces for a whole conglomerate of us to decorate. Her efficiency is legend and I feel like modular builders should take note of her production methods. She cranks out gingerbread walls like Amazon cranks out packages. All we have to do, and when I say we I am talking about around twenty kids and adults, is just show up with candy and get to decorating. Tina even makes the royal icing that cements the whole structure together. It's such a good time and it makes me feel like I am in preschool again, which is a double win in my book. Now where's my juice box!

Anyway, there were so many people that we had to take turns decorating in shifts. That was fine with me as I soon found myself embroiled in a very deep discussion of the merits of subjective opinions. By this I mean that I flicked a ton of metaphorical fecal matter at a very opinionated eighteen year old male. It was fun and made time pass quite nicely.

My daughter, being a literal soul, used every single candy offering to adorn her house. I am pretty sure that structurally she was committing a code violation. Like too many gumdrops per square inch and such, but in the end she made it work, and by work I mean that people had to guess that the house was made out of gingerbread because you really couldn't see what its foundation was.

My son is more of a minimalist, and his house kinda looked like something a person who was way into the whole Hygge trend might have designed. He stuck to one color theme, red, and kept the decorative flair at a minimum. I'm sure Marie Kondo would be proud.

As for my house, I guess I am somewhere in the middle of the road, preferring a bit of decorative flair but not minding a bit of wall surface space to gaze upon. It's not like I could decorate with a modicum of concentration anyway, as I ended up having an infant in my arms most of the night. For some reason people kept depositing the tiny creature into my arms, and as I am a tad bit infantile myself, I found my attention rapt on the small fry's antics and needs for much of the night. Of course the little guy repaid my efforts with a lovely little concrete-like hair mask of royal icing applied right to the back of my hair. Sigh.

The assortment of candy available for decorating was pretty smashing. We had chocolate Santas, snowmen, and other seasonal ilk. There were candy raspberries and blackberries, mini candy canes, chunks of peppermint, red and green M&M's, festively wrapped Reece's Peanut Butter Cups, chocolate bells, red hots, Sixlets, Hershey kisses in multiple different colored wrappers, gumdrops, and the hated Snowman Peeps. I swear all that Peeps are good for is .22 target practice, AHH!

Oh, sorry, the word Peep triggers me. Heh.

After a few hours we all had our houses looking pretty festive. As I gave my entire house a dusting of snow (powdered sugar), Tina looked at me and said, "Don't forget your tree!" The sainted creature had turned sugar cones into buttercream frosted Christmas trees complete with yellow stars. I royal icing glued my tree to the cardboard at the end of my gumdrop lined sidewalk and smiled like a toothless 5 year old getting a string cheese. It doesn't matter how old you are, there are just somethings that bring out the wonder in your soul, and I am so thankful for getting to spend the afternoon in the company of good friends doing something that brought joy. Even if I looked like a Willy Wonka reject after we were all done.

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And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's royal icing covered and currently encrusted in a layer of powdered sugar iPhone.

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