Gingerbread House - Part 1

So, after many, many years of saying, "I'm going to bake my own Gingerbread House", I finally decided, this was the year.  I started this with looking at many photos and recipes and picked my weekend to begin.  That was last weekend, when the recipe I chose turned out to be a nightmare.  Now, I'm not new to baking, have been doing it for 30+ years, and even have done a bit of decorating as well.  This recipe just didn't come together.  So, I decided that was enough for that weekend.  Did more research, found another recipe, by Teresa Layman and decided on the Two-Story City House pattern from http://www.gingerbread-house-heaven.com/ . I assembled all my ingredients and dove in.  Let me just say, after making literally, hundreds of cut out cookies, this was not as easy as I thought it would be.  I followed the the instructions to the letter and my first batch came out of the oven looking like they just weren't baked enough.

At that point I decided to use some of my own cookie knowledge and instead of rolling the dough between just the parchment paper, I decided to throw flour on the counter and start rolling it out as I would my normal cookie dough.  It started working much better and the dough started looking better when it emerged from the oven.  It seemed to look, in my opinion, as it was suppose to look.

So, here are all the pieces ready for the next step in my gingerbread house building journey.

Once the pieces were all baked, I decided that the windows on the back of the house would be nice with a colored glass to them.  I once saw a program that taught, if you took Jolly Rangers and put them through a mini chopper until they became the consistency of dust, that you could create beautiful windows.  I put that theory to the test and it worked beautifully.

Filling them with the crushed Jolly Rangers.....I chose blue ones.

Filled and ready to melt them.  I had the oven set at 350 and let them melt for 10 minutes.

I think they turned out rather nicely.

So, for today, that's it.....I'm glad I've decided to take this thing in stages.  I now know why it takes months for some of these works of art to be completed.  At this stage in the game, I'll be happy if I can get mine to stand up and look like a house.  I had announced to friends and family that I would make one each year......I'm thinking right now, I'm not sure if I want to do one every year, it's very time intensive.....maybe I was being a bit over-confident in my ability to patiently build a gingerbread house.  Time will tell.

Bakingmomof4