Gingy gingerbread house
Everyone is home for the holidays in this gingerbread house filled with fun festive faces. All of the personalities are here! There’s nothing like hustle and bustle of a chaotic house, bursting at the seams with gingerbread people, to make it feel like Christmas. That is just what I was craving when I made this house! It was many months into Covid, and the dark winter nights and evenings empty of holiday cheer had me feeling blue. With everyone on lockdown and no hopes of big, fun, family Christmas gatherings, I decided to make a house full of family and friends, but in gingerbread form! If I couldn’t enjoy my family in real life, at least I could live vicariously though these gingys!
Gum drops, made of gum paste coated in sugar, line the walkway up to this sweet gingerbread house.
This gingerbread brother and sister are having fun in the snow covered front yard, and getting ready for a snowball fight.
A dapper bow-tied gingy is leaning against a peppermint stick post. The red bow-tie and the gum paste peppermint pole are few of the red details on this mostly pastel house.
A little gingerbread girl peeks out of the window to say “hello.”
This little gingy is making a snow angel in the yard.
Here are all of the gingerbread “personalities.” Not sure if they all made it onto the house, but most of them did! They are made of gum paste and the details are piped with royal icing.
Here are some shots from the making of this house. The first shot shows the gingerbread before baking. I always bake my gingerbread on non-stick parchment paper; this helps keep the gingerbread from sticking, and it’s also a bog part of the rolling out process.
The shot in the upper right shows the baked gingerbread after the isomalt windows have been poured in. I have experimented with a lot of different windows on my gingerbread houses, but isomalt is the best and most stable option.
The lower left shot shows the scale model that I make out of poster board. I do this for every house that I make. It helps to get from the vision to construction and work out any kinks in the design. The final shot on the lower right shows the gingerbread house in the middle stages of construction. You can see that the roof pieces are curved. I do this by baking the gingerbread roof pieces and placing them onto the house while they are still hot. This enables them to bend to the curve of the roof line.
This door is one of my favorite features of this house. Interestingly, when the windows are lit up, you can’t see the blue tint to the isomalt. They appear clear, and I’m not sure why this is.
Here is another up-close shot of the gingerbread brother.
And here is the sweet gingerbread sister!
The tree is decorated with tiny pearl candies and green and white Sixlets affixed with royal icing
This baby gingy is the cutest. I love her heart shaped buttons.
This gingy girl is adorned with a beautiful bow! This shot also gives you a good view of the colored isomalt windows. I tinted the isomalt a dark aqua blue, but it appears darker in most of the shots.
This grumpy gingerbread man is all dressed up with nowhere to go.
He’s really struggling to put the star on the tippy top of the tree.
A gingerbread boy and girl are having fun sledding down the roof top!
I hope you enjoyed this gingerbread house, and I hope you get to be with all of your family this year for Christmas!
XO~Sarah
