Hurricane Ginger

I did it. I attempted to make a gingerbread house with my kids, even though we are officially looking at the Ghost of Christmas Past. And I learned that gingerbread houses are obviously only meant to be made before Christmas. And I mean something like one to three weeks prior to Christmas, not eleven months and three weeks before. I know this because I survived the gingerbread apocalypse at our house. It was gruesome, but I am here to tell you the tale.

First of all Lindsey designed a very cute house, and we spent most of one afternoon drawing the patterns.  Here's what happened next:

I used the one and only, very exact, self-same recipe I use for our gingerbread houses every year. After baking every piece twice as long as usual, the gingerbread was still too soft. I had to leave the pieces out on the table for a couple days so they would dry up and be hard enough to use for home construction.

baked and left to dry

Once the house pieces were cooked and dried I made the candy for the windows, and I burned it. It wasn't terribly burnt, but definitely amber-colored. I figured that, with white lights inside the house, it would look like our gingerbread people used incandescent lights. I could live with that.

Traditionally, I always put the first wreath on the door before we build anything else.

building the fancy windows

Then the very exact, self-same frosting recipe I always use didn't work. No matter how much I used to glue the house pieces together, it was just not going to stick. I started out by gluing box windows and gables onto house pieces and leaving them to dry while I worked on other construction areas. The house was sort of holding together OK, although not as well as I thought it should.

the first walls go up

two more walls—the candy-cane pillars were not
part of the original design

The two candy canes were put in place in an attempt at supporting the box window that fell off.   You can see me working on putting up a support to hold the inside corner roof that goes over the door with the wreath.

After an hour-and-a-half of building, I added the box window piece to the construction site. This held up for about five minutes before the box fell off and knocked down some of the other walls. Well, I thought, the original house plan is wrecked, but maybe we can still use some of the intact pieces to make a three-sided to decorate and light up.

two walls left standing and unbroken (temporarily) after the roof collapses

No. The roof of this smaller house fell in, knocking down one wall and it, too, was destroyed.

devastation after the storm

all that remains of one family's dream home

So I told my kids to frost and stick candies to the house pieces and eat them. (Yum! Stale gingerbread with stale candy glued to it!).  They ate all they wanted, and the rest made its way to the trash can.

disaster cleanup

cleanup crew at work

I have learned from this experience that gingerbread house construction is not to be attempted on a whim, and should only be done in the appropriate season.

You have been warned.