Kitchen Table Project: Gingerbread House

Over the past few weeks, there have been many things on our kitchen table.

In case you don't already know this about me, I have a tendency to get a bee in my bonnet about a project. And then another bee. And another one. Pretty soon there's a hive of projects on our table.

Here's another one: The Gingerbread House.

My Omnivore had never made one before, and since I was making one to take to Ms. Food Snoot's Santa Lucia party for the kids, I figured I might as well make two and then we'd have one to decorate for ourselves.

Martha Stewart (of course) has directions and templates and videos that are quite helpful, plus the recipe makes three houses-- or two houses and a whole army of very tasty gingerbread men.
Yum.

My Omnivore had never heard of making windows out of butterscotches before, but he suggested that maybe crushed up jolly ranchers would make good "stained glass."




We tried both and actually, I have to say, the Jolly Ranchers were absolutely gorgeous.





If we'd made the windows a bit bigger, it would have been even better, but we were conservative about cutting them into Martha's templates because I was afraid it would affect the stability of the walls.


The royal icing seal job -- handled by my Omnivore-- went smoothly for the most part, although setting it up to dry is a little scary. Propping it with cans is helpful though, and setting it on a cardboard cake round from the start makes moving it less scary.





The final product, with a path of red hots and crushed butterscotch.

A diabetic's dream...

And yes, it stayed proudly displayed on our Kitchen Table for at least a month.