craft | Dianasaur Dishes

Winner of Our 2009 Gingerbread Contest and How to Make a Gingerbread Train

If you need a gingerbread or frosting recipe, check out my post on our winning gingerbread chapel last year.

Gingerbread House Competition

We have an annual tradition with Eric’s family, a gingerbread contest, and we’re hard core! You voted for your favorites, and the winner is….drum roll please!

How We Made Our Country Chapel Gingerbread House

I’ve never done a gingerbread house before, this was the first, and a lot of fun! Making your own gingerbread house is a bit of work. Some of the advantages are

1. It’s typically cheaper, especially if you already have the ingredients

2. You can create your own design

3. It makes your apartment smell AMAZING! And heats it up too

Some of the disadvantages:

1. It takes longer

2. It can be harder to fit together if the shape changes as it’s cooking

3. We made ours so big that it took a lot more time to decorate

Hopefully this post can help you figure out if you want to do yours from scratch or not. We definitely think it was worth making our own just to be creative. It was Eric’s idea to do a chapel. We live next door to our church and are getting ready to kick off a new ministry there next month, so it seemed appropriate.

The first step was finding a recipe and a pattern. I probably could have designed my own, but wanted to play it safe for my first gingerbread house. I found a pattern here, it’s tough to see because of the size, but it give me the idea to be able to draw it out myself with a ruler.

Then came the recipe, I found tons of different recipes for making the gingerbread, but this one was the simplest and used the fewest ingredients (which translated to less cost!) By the way, the recipe says you can sub corn syrup for the molasses but we avoid that stuff whenever possible.

Gingerbread Cookie Dough

Ingredients

1 cup vegetable shortening

1 cup sugar

1 cup dark molasses

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon cinnamon

4 cups of flour

Instructions

Melt the first three items in a pot over low heat.

Remove from heat and stir in baking soda through cinnamon.

Then stir in flour, 1 cup at a time. (You may have to enlist the help of an electric mixer on the last cup as the dough gets quite thick and hard to stir. Split the dough into manageable balls, wrapping excess in plastic wrap. Roll out, cut pieces, bake at 375 for 6-12 minutes.

(I forgot to melt the first three ingredients before putting them in the bowl, so I just put my mixing bowl on a hot burner and stirred until it was all melter. Also, I used the electric mixer the whole time, and just tore off a little to roll out each piece, rather than balling it up)

Shortening, sugar and molasses look like something our of Willy Wonka’s factory

The pattern for our side walls and roof

I drew all of my pattern pieces and then cut them out. I rolled out the dough a little bigger than my pattern piece. I used two books the same thickness to rest my rolling pin handles on to try and roll the dough out evenly. The I lay the pattern piece on top of the dough and used a table knife to cut around it. For the windows I had another piece the window shape and cut around that then pulled the pieces out. The pattern pieces got SO oily, it was pretty funny, they went from computer paper to looking like waxed paper. We did the baking 2 nights before the competition.

Side wall with window cut outs

We crushed up a bunch of jolly ranchers, and melted some of them for the stained glass windows. I just placed some in 6 clumps on a foil covered baking sheet, then popped them in the oven. The first time I tried I didn’t watch them and 3 minutes later they were brown glass. So the second time we sat and watched it and took them out when they were melted.

Once they were cooled, we carefully pulled the foil off, then put some frosting around the inside of the window cut out and stuck them on. We made a strip of foil and stuck it to the inside wall behind the windows to reflect light back through the windows. We prefrosted and stuck on some small gingerbread pieces (that helped us to be able to save some money on candy). Then, the night before the contest, we put the base together.

Egg White Icing
3 egg whites

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

1 (16 oz box) confectioners powdered sugar

In a large bowl combine all ingredients. Beat 7 minutes with an electric mixer until smooth and thick.. A good test is when a knife blade drawn through the icing leave a clean cut. Store in a tightly sealed container if you are not using it right away.

Our base got sturdy very quickly but we still let it dry overnight, and put the roof, doors and steps on the next morning. (the contest was in the afternoon) Canned goods work really well for supporting your base while it dries. Eric said one day we’ll get out a can of beans and wonder why it has hard white stuff on it!

Notice how Eric covered our baking sheet in foil. We were so glad he did that when I realized our house needed to be back further to fit the doors and steps on. we just moved the foil and it worked perfectly. Once everything was put together and solid, we were ready to decorate.

As I said in my last post, Eric did the almond roof and did a really impressive job. He put a line of frosting along the bottom of the roof, then placed slivered almonds on it. He continued repeating this up the roof, overlapping the almonds. The steeple is an ice cream cone covered in frosting. I made a gingerbread cross for it but forgot it when we were decorating.

Trees are surprisingly easy to make. I just drew an outline of a tree on paper, cut it out and traced it to have two. Cut out two pieces per tree and give one a long notch from the bottom and one from the top. Test with your paper patterns to make sure the notches are the right length. Remember they have to be wide enough to fit over your cookie. Don’t attach your trees before decorating them. We did that to be safer for transporting to Eric’s parents, but they’re much easier to frost and decorate horizontal.

You can figure out the gumdrop lamp, just break the curve off of a mini candy cane. Coconut sprinkled onto white rosting makes great snow.

One thing we forgot was the back wall. By the time we got to it, we didn’t have a plan and were tired and hungry so we went minimalist. But I like the row of “bushes”.

Thanks for checking out our house, we really had a blast making it and it was such a fun family activity. Hope this post can help you decide if making a gingerbread house from scratch is right for you.

Gingerbread House Winner!!!

Thank you for voting on our competition. Here are the results-

In Third Place with 2 votes…

John and Heather with their Christmas Chalet!

In Second Place with 17 votes…

Patti and Jeff with their Candy Cottage!

and in First Place with 27 votes…

Eric and Diana with our country chapel!

Thank you guys so much for voting. Let me just tell you how important this was to my darling hubby. I made our house from scratch to save money, and was trying to think of the cheapest and least amount of candy we could get to cut costs there as well. At the store, I was explaining to Eric that we were going to draw shingles on the roof with frosting. He insisted that his mom would make Necco Wafer shingles and so we had to have some kind of real shingles. I explained to him how I was trying to save money (he is the thrifty one who hates spending money), but he said “I want to win, and if we’re going to win we need shingles.” I thought that was so cute that I started shouting out different shingle ideas “wheat thins! triscuits! chewing gum (which was a sacrifice to suggest because I HATE gum)! Airheads! almond slivers!” As soon as I said almond slivers his eyes lit up with excitement. He was even the one smart enough realize we should buy them in the bulk food section, not the baking section.

In the picture below he realized that all the big whole almond slivers were used up on one side of the roof and he still had a side to go. He did such a good job on the roof and I was very impressed.

I’m sure you could all tell that Eric’s mom was the experienced ginger bread house maker. Hers was so neat and meticulous. Now I understand why Eric kept wanting to wipe up all our frosting and make things even, it totally makes a difference, and his parents’ house looked so professional. I think if his mom was in a Christmas apron she’d look like a young Mrs. Claus in this picture!

Heather and John were so much fun in their creativity. They couldn’t find a house at the Safeway by Heather’s apartment in Seattle so Patti was nice enough to buy them one that morning and put it together for them. They didn’t come with a plan, but I really like how it turned out! They had some really neat ideas and I love the way the roof looks. Plus the Nerds pool is so funny! If John is reading this, Eric and I think you’re cool

If you want to see how we made our house from scratch, check it out here. It was a LONG process. But it cost about half the price, and we won, so it was worth the extra effort!

Thank you all so much again. You really added to the fun of this experience and helped make it a great memory for all of us.

Judge our Gingerbread House Competition!!!

On Saturday, Eric and I got together with his sister Heather and her boyfriend John, and Eric’s parents, Jeff and Patti, to have a couple’s gingerbread house contest. It was a lot of fun, and we decided it would be great to have a bunch of unbiased people be our judges. So I came up with the brilliant idea of posting the pictures on my blog and letting my fellow foodies vote on them. I’m posting an overall shot of each house along with some up close detail photos.

Please leave a comment with which gingerbread house you think should win (A, B, of C) and why you chose it. On Wednesday December 10th I’ll tally the comments and declare who you chose as winner! (Eric, Heather, John, Mom and Dad, you don’t get to vote!)

A. Christmas Chalet