So Christmas time is over and hopefully you are not a lazy bum and have put the decorations away and gone back to normal. I’ll always remember this house down the street from me growing up that blew up one February. Turns out having a dried out Xmas tree and dumping gasoline on some rags to clean your motorcycle is a bad combination… but I digress. I put all the ornaments back in their boxes and threw away all the stale cookies on New Year’s Eve. There were a lot of stale cookies. Apparently we don’t eat lots of cookies with weird fruitcake bits in them. But there are still two decorations on display.

In early December I heard several people talk about how they were going to get some of those no-bake gingerbread house kits from the fancy culinary/gourmet stores. And because a kit is both ridiculous and not nearly as hardcore as making your own gingerbread assembly, I decided that come mid-December there would be a gingerbread date night. When I was a teen I helped out as a TA at the community rec center with some of the classes including gingerbread house making so I was pretty sure I could sort it out.

I almost gave up when I made the dough in advance as the recipe suggested I could and it turned into a solid rock of spicy cement overnight. After some splashes of water and a minute in the microwave it was pliable enough to roll out. I doubt that makes for a tasty cookie, but since gingerbread houses sit out for a month going stale anyway, who cares. The construction notes said to make a double or triple batch of royal icing for one house, so to be prepared I went for a triple. Again, since it was going to sit out for a month I used raw eggs (and crappy cheap ones at that). I put a bit of blue coloring in to keep it from going grey. The huge batch turned out to be a mistake. I don’t know what the hell they expect you to do with all that icing, maybe little kids eat half of it or line the base with an inch of snow. A single batch would have been enough for both our houses and then some. I had about a quart of slightly blue, inedible royal icing when I was done. The only thing it was good for was squishing between your fingers. Something about the texture. I probably had my hands in it for a good 10 minutes before I threw it out.

I went traditional with a snowy roof and candy cane corners. I tried to thin some icing to do the icicle thing but never got it to work very well. There are spearmint leaf bushes, Redhot decorations, and a Tootsie Roll log pile, all dusted with a light snow of powdered sugar. I let the Hubs have the Necco wafers to shingle his roof. We could have both had shingles if he wasn’t the one person on earth who actually likes the taste of Necco wafers (he says his favorite is “Pepto Bismol” flavor). He then decided he had to wire his house for electricity. At night you could just see the warm glow of the tiny light bulb across the dark living room. You can’t tell in the photo, but there is even a candy cane power pole in the rear.

-Allison Yates
I can’t bring myself to dump them in the trash, but a demolition date night might be pretty fun.