Gingerbread!!

Are you ready to see the most adorable gingerbread house ever? I don't think you are. I don't think I should show you...because it is so adorable that you might not be able to handle it. Honestly.

This week, in preparation for the Rotary House Tour and a night of fun(draising) at Willowbank Kristina, Ashleigh and I, set out to make a fantastic gingerbread house. We based the design off of Bob Watson's house, which you may remember I wrote about way back in September. You should definitely click on the link above to go back and refresh yourself on what Bob's house looks like so that you can see just how awesome our tiny gingerbread house turned out.

It definitely was a labour of love and after much bickering over the recipe, decorations, scale, what should and shouldn't be included (and also about 40 hours of labour, yikes!) we were totally awed and satisfied with our resultant creation. I think if you want to see it there should definitely be a drum roll in here, feel free to drum along. Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum, rum-pum-pum-pum, rum-pum-pum-pum. (Shhh, stop laughing, this is appropriate given the season, plus its the only drum roll I know how to produce with onomatopoeia.)

Anyways, too much to do when no further to do would have done just right.

Ta-Da!:

The front! (And Kristina keeping a very intensely steady hand as she pipes the final details on: the historically accurate downspouts.)

The Side!

The other side and back!

And in case anyone thinks we are crazy for having done this. We thought of it as a self-imposed mini-exam. We discussed so many architectural terms while creating this baby that its not even funny. Also we are now totally down with the proportions necessary for a Georgian/Loyalist house.

This also gave Kristina a chance to spread the word on flooding. What is flooding you may ask? Well, its the method by which we made all that wonderfully smooth stonework on the facade of the house. You pipe regular strength royal icing around what you want to fill in, then you water down the icing and pipe it into the space between. And if you are crazy like us, you apply that to the whole cookie/house.

So we brought this gorgeous puppy into school where they are being auctioned off along with houses by local bakeries and other gingerbread house architects. Here are some of my favourites that I happened to snap pictures of as they were being set up.

We weren't the only students partaking in the auction. Here is Doug's political statement/art piece. Those are little garbage trucks on the bridge dumping 'waste' on the slum below. I'll let you fill in your own commentary and figure out the latin yourself. Hopefully all the little old biddies who will be bidding on them won't remember as much.

I really liked this one. It's really simple but fantastically whimsical and wonderfully executed. I think if I were a bird I'd definitely want to spend Christmas in this house.

And of course I can't leave out Julian and his wife Betsy's Queen Anne masterpiece.  (We snuck into Julian's office yesterday to steal a peek and see what we were up against.)