The Making of a Gingerbread House

I just finished this year's gingerbread house.  

Our theme this year for our Christmas party is Greece so I went with a classic Greek home.  Very square, white stucco, blue accents.  

Every gingerbread house I ever make starts with this fabulous book, The Gingerbread Architect.    

The gingerbread recipe in the book is the BEST I have found.  It bakes perfectly and is very strong.  Tasty too!  

But the real reason I love the book is the plans.  There are plans for 12 different style houses so I can always find one that suits my needs and then I can go off and decorate in my own style.  This year I used the plans for an Adobe style house because it has the same architectural style.  I transferred the plans to paper so the house would be the size I wanted.

Then I rolled out and the dough and cut all of my pieces.  I like to roll the dough out on a piece of parchment paper so I can easily move my pieces to the cookie sheets.  Then I bake and cool.

Assembly comes next.  My favorite part!  Just follow the directions in the book, use a good homemade royal icing and have a supply of cans handy to support the pieces while they dry.

Once it is all assembled, I let it dry overnight so I don;t knock anything loose when I am decorating.

For my Greek house, I decided to ice the entire house in royal icing to resemble the classic white stucco.  For some other styles I might leave the walls pretty bare of even apply fondant clapboard siding.

The come the details.  This Greek house was very simple but some years I could spend days making all the little details.  This year was just a few blue shutters and doors made from fondant.  I am one of those people who makes a lot of decorations from fondant instead of candy because I like a lot of realism in my house.  I use things like herbs, seeds, nuts, M&Ms, cereal and coconut though!

After the shutters and doors are hung I added some trees made of thyme and a ground covering of pumpkin seeds.  I thought these looked most like the arid landscape of Greece.

I think I prefer making a more elaborate house but it was really fun to see this one come to life because it was different from anything I have done in the past.  A bit of an adventure!

Here are a few of my past gingerbread houses.