I taught a baking class one year at this time. The College hosted a “Christmas at the College” event so we built a Gingerbread Village.

We invited small children in to decorate graham cracker houses and students created large house. Here is a gallery of the different houses on display.

Notice the windows, inside lighting, stained glass and the one Thomas Kincaid House and look for the ice skater and the 3 little pigs houses made from “straw, sticks and bricks”.

There are a lot of ideas for decorating your gingerbread house. Some materials you can use are:

• Ice cream cones: traditional and sugar cones for roof peaks and trees
• Sheet gelatin for windows, you can make stained glass by using a cotton swab and food coloring
• Rock candy for rock walls and pathways
• Shredded wheat for thatched roofs and frosted shredded wheat for snow topped
• Dentine gum for bricks
• Marshmallows for snow men
• Candy corn for candle flames
• Pretzel rods and sticks for fence posts and fire wood stacks
• Hold your house together with hot glue and then cover the glue with royal icing. The house will hold together better and not be as fragile.
• Don’t cut walls too thin. They need to be strong enough to support the weight of the roof and all the candy you are going to stuck to it.
• Use a sturdy board as the base so you can move the house around on the base and not have to lift the actual house itself to move around.
• Plan a hole in the bottom of the board to stuff twinkle lights into so the inside of the house lights up.

Happy Holidays!