this old house

During my childhood, I occasionally watched an episode of "This Old House" starring Bob Vila with my dad. Bob Vila always made undertaking huge house projects seem easy. I never saw Bob make a gingerbread house, but I'm sure he could have given me a few tips last Saturday when I was building mine.
 
My gingerbread dough turned out great and after cutting out templates for my houses, I rolled out the dough and cut out the pieces to bake. I also cut out holes for the windows.

We melted sugar to pour in the window frames and it gave the windows a very realistic look. Next, I made a batch of royal icing to start gluing my house together. Bob Vila uses nails, chefs use icing. These fours walls were up in no time.

Orange Reese's Pieces on the front of the house? Of course. When this was finished, I decided to attach my roof. This is where I needed the Bob Vila hotline. I made my roof slabs slightly larger than the side pieces so there would be some overhang, but I didn't think about making them slightly thinner so they wouldn't weigh so much. This is some heavy duty gingerbread.

If you haven't already guessed, I glued my roof on top and while I was decorating the rest of the house, it promptly decided to collapse. Thinking fast, I broke pretzel rods in half and lined them up along the top of the house. Chef Vila, I mean P,  helped me cut down my roof a bit so that it would fit better with the pretzels as support and all was well. Almost....don't look too closely at my roof on the back right side. It's a good thing it doesn't rain in candy land.

I went for a pretzel motif on the back and a sprinkling of red hots all around. The marshmallow fence is surrounding candy corn lights underneath the windows. There are even grazing deer near the tree.

In the end, everything was fine and I took home a nice house. But since this old house almost destroyed my grade in class, I decided it might be fun to destroy it in the street in front of our house. Okay, it was really Greg's idea, but I was totally on board. Plus, I didn't want it to start attracting ants to our dining room table. Here is the documented destruction.


Me and this old house on our street.

The house plummeting to its demise.

Is anyone getting a Wizard of Oz flashback here?

The wicked old gingerbread house is dead.

I must say, this was very cathartic and a ton of fun. Perhaps I'll feel the urge to smash my wedding cake next Saturday? I guess we'll have to wait and see.