Gingerbread House

As part of our holiday work party, each department in our division was given a pre-made gingerbread house and two weeks to decorate. Now this project was right up my alley, especially since I was planning on making a gingerbread house this year myself. Competition was on....especially since I was being referenced to as the "Martha Stewart" of Enrollment Services. No pressure. No pressure at all.....

Well, after we started decorating our work house I decided to ditch the idea of making my own house, as it would be way too much work.

This was the premade house we were given. (The icing job was a bit sloppy but I had no control over that....)

We used cardboard from a box as the base and applied aluminum foil.

Here is an array of pictures of our finished house. I'm not going to lie......I'm impressed. There were a total of 6 ladies working on the house and/or contributing ideas.

Rachel drew the windows on parchment paper. Amazing job! The house did not have a chimney, so we added one! Just used the back of a notepad and applied royal icing and red hots and voila.

The roof is tiled with chocolate Neccos.

Oh, might I add......we used a hot glue to secure almost everything. Brilliant idea instead of using royal icing and waiting for it to dry.

I pre-made the trees using a waffle cone and royal icing. So simple! Then, using a sifter we sifted confectioners sugar on everything.

The fence is made out of tootsie rolls and pretzels. Topped off with royal icing and a candy.

The string of lights is actually a necklace I found at Hallmark and some of the bulbs actually light up.

The ground is covered in royal icing and coconut.

And yes, our house has a Christmas Tree and Menorah.

I'm loving the reindeer which is made from a tootsie roll, pretzels and a piece from a cupcake kit. And the pile of logs. Love it!

Snowman made out of foam balls, twizzler scarf, toothpick nose and tootsie rolls for the hat.

How cute is this sled and mini snowmen? The sled is made from mini candy canes and twizzlers and the snowmen are gum drops with royal icing for the features.

Seriously, how cute is our mailbox and lamp posts??????????

Close up of the wreath and icicles I piped.

And you can't forget about the snowcap walk way!

A lot of our ideas came from this book I purchased a couple of years ago. I highly recommend buying it if you are going to make a gingerbread house and are not naturally creative (like me)!!

Unfortunately we did not win. We did not even make it into the top 3 (out of 6 houses). We were robbed. Bottom line!