What a Week!

What a week this has been!
It's been a good week, but what a week. I guess it all started last Friday (the 20th) with two online events/announcements: 

First, President Nelson did a special online broadcast about gratitude, and invited everyone watching to make social media their gratitude journals for a week. Thousands of people took that challenge and suddenly instead of the complaining, snarky, accusing, etc. political or covid (or whatever) posts I'd been seeing so much of, there was almost nothing but gratitude showing up on my facebook page. It was wonderful! I think Michael iterated it best when he said that instead of people just reposting memes or other things they saw, they were suddenly talking about their own, real lives (in a positive way!). This is what made social media fun, and nice, and interesting again.

Second, I saw the ad for the Holly Days gingerbread house contest. My family has gone to Holly Days every year since we moved to Vernal. They usually block off a main intersection and have firebowls there, serve hot chocolate or spiced cider, have free activities, etc. It's a pretty big deal around here. It was a little different this year, but they still had the gingerbread contest. Every year we've gone to see the gingerbread houses, and vote for the "People's Choice" award, and every year we conceited Norths have thought, "We could win this contest." But it has been so much fun to give our house to a family who has little children that we've been doing just that, and have never entered the contest.

But this year I thought it might be difficult to find a family who wasn't afraid of getting a house made entirely of cookies and candies for their children to eat. (Covid. >sigh<) So we decided to enter the contest.

Bruce was going to be home a lot, and he wanted to be more involved in making the house this year. So he started looking for designs on...Saturday? I think it was Saturday morning. And he chose this one:

It looked trickier than any other houses we've built, but I figured we could do it. I started drawing up the patterns Saturday night, but I was super tired that day, and didn't finish. (I had wanted to make the patterns on Saturday, bake on Sunday, and build and decorate on Monday. This would still give me enough time for all our Thanksgiving preparations. The best laid plans...)

Exhaustion seemed to be the word of the week for me. We finished drawing most of the patterns by Sunday night, but that morning I'd woke (woken? awakened?) at 4:30 a.m. and by night time I couldn't make myself stay up past 9:00. Monday I woke up at a more decent time—5:30—and finished drawing the plans, and started making the gingerbread. We were a day behind schedule.

This picture was actually taken after we baked most of the house. In the bottom left corner you can see the mold we made for the bottom of the turret. The point was molded onto an ice cream cone.

This year, after seeing a cookie recipe that Kim had posted, I decided to put cocoa into the gingerbread for the roof pieces so they'd be a darker color than the rest of the house. Just cocoa didn't do it; I had to add black food coloring, which made it turn a disgusting green, and then I added red food coloring to correct it. It did bake up to a nice, chocolatey brown. We had already decided to mold the round tower on a salt box, but how to make that tower roof took some figuring out.

The turret on the left is in two pieces; it doesn't look too bad from this angle, but there is a huge gap that would have to have been filled with a lot of frosting. I decided to try to make it all in one piece. And I was successful, except that I had covered both the base and the cone with foil, hoping that I could extract them from the inside of the turret, making the whole thing edible.
The base came out, but not the cone. You can also
see the salt box, cut in half and covered in foil,
with the tower baked onto it. (The molds came
out of those pieces easily.)

By bedtime (11:00) Monday night I still had a few house pieces left to bake. When I got up on Tuesday morning (5:00 wake-up time—not intentional) I thought I'd bake the rest of the pieces. And then I saw that pointy roof piece. I really didn't want the foil in there. So I got a fork and started picking at the cone to break it. And I was successful until about halfway up; then I poked a hole into the gingerbread. Oh noooo! Well, I still had some chocolate gingerbread in the fridge, so I patched the hole and stuck it back into the oven. Next thing I know, I smell burning gingerbread. So I rush to the oven, open it, and see that the tower roof had softened, fell apart, and some of it was burning on the bottom of the oven. AAAAACK!

My roof, in ruins.

Well, there was still gingerbread dough in the fridge, but not the chocolate stuff. So I had to get out the plain gingerbread and try to duplicate the color, and rebuild the roof. Fortunately I still had the mold for the base. This time I did not cover the cone with foil; in about thirty minutes I had a new tower roof that was completely edible. But it was a pretty good scare for first thing in the morning.

The windows were all put in by around 1:00.

I always put the Christmas tree in the front
window. And here I'm putting a wreath
into the tower door's window too.
Meticulous work.
There you see Kaylie and Bruce looking
at all the pieces with the windows done.

Finally, we could start on the construction.

We managed to get the lights into the house (that's the easy part), but we needed to make sure a few lights would stay in the little extensions next to the tower, plus we needed a light in the tower itself. We actually had all the walls up when we started, but the main front wall fell over (and was caught by some quick hands!) when we started on the lighting.

Ryan got all the lights in place, and here he is putting a reflector above the tower light. (His clever idea.)

There's the tower light. And if you look, you can see
the front walls are all in place too.

By now it was dinner time. And the kitchen looked like this:

Not just this counter; the whole kitchen looked like this.

After dinner, we still had to put the roofs on the house before we could decorate.

It turns out that this flat roof was the trickiest bit of construction...actual building. We had to trim pieces to match angles, and then we were afraid that putting the flat top on would make the rest collapse. I should have more faith in the royal icing—when it finishes setting up, it's as tough as bricks.

We worked on decorating for a little while, but then the kids went to play a multi-player video game with some friends who live out of town, and I was on my own. By 10:00 I was more than exhausted, and I finally gave up around 11:00.

Ryan puts PEZ bricks on a chimney; Kaylie is putting holly under and around windows.

The door to the tower. I decorated it and...
Do you see what I see on that tower?
(No, not me in the background. On the tower itself.)
I suppose it's only fitting after we spent two days calling that roof "the witches hat" or "the wizard's hat".

Wednesday morning. The house needs to be turned in between 1:00 an 2:00 p.m. Not a scrap of Thanksgiving cooking has been done. We all worked like mad to get the gingerbread house finished on time! 

close-up of the front door

right side of house

from the left-front (tower) corner

back and left side of house

front of house

This might be my favorite picture of the house.

On our way to the museum, at about 1:25.
Dad watches as Ryan and I maneuver stairs, a misplaced bench for the van, and the cat, while we take the house out to Rachel's car. (How often do you take the house to the car?)

This is what we left behind:

At the museum, to pay us for our conceit, we saw some really nice gingerbread houses—I knew at least two of them were serious contenders. And there were still more arriving as we left. 

I was sure this would be the winning house. It looks like it was done by a professional cake-decorator, with lots of airbrushing in the house and the landscaping.
It was amazing!

And I was pretty sure this one would win a prize too. You can't really tell from the photos, but the landscaping on this house was beautiful! I think everything was dusted with edible glitter.

When we got to the museum, our extension cord wouldn't reach the outlet. But the nice lady who worked there found us a cord and got everything plugged in and... it didn't work! Oh nooo! She found another cord, and it did work. Whew! Half the charm of our house is the lighted windows. We admired all the other houses, and then went back home to work on cleaning up and Thanksgiving preparations. (Thanksgiving was lovely, but this post is already too long. I'll write a short post about the holiday later.)

On Friday we got a text from the judges of the contest telling us we'd won second place! How exciting!

I thought the gnome house and the red house would come out ahead of us, and we would get third place—
if no other fabulous houses came in after ours.
I thought the gnome house would be first,
but the judges weren't sure it was entirely made
of gingerbread, so it got third. I'll bet it was though.
I could see that the roof was gingerbread, and
I'm pretty sure the candy rocks on the outside of
the house had to be "glued" on to some kind of structure; it would be nearly impossible to get such nice straight walls by just mortaring those rocks together.

Well, it was all pretty exciting! And exhausting. And now my only wish is that, after we pick up our house tomorrow, we could find a family with little kids who would like to have it—giving it to delighted little children is still more fun than winning a contest, fun as that was. 

Maybe someone will still take it. We'll see. We'll see.