Modern Gingerbread House

Thanks to a gift from my Aunt Debbie & Uncle Jeff from Tennessee, we embarked on our first ever gingerbread house this past holiday. Most people probably build their gingerbread houses a bit before Christmas so they can consume it visually and as a sugar laden tasty treat through the holidays. We view it as a family craft project, of course with a little bit of customization we made it a Mid Century Modern Prefab Gingerbread house.

The kit comes in the box shown in the second photo. A quick organization of all necessary building components is shown in the third photo. A plastic tray houses the gingerbread pieces of the square planned house. The icing is premixed and ready to go along with the assorted candy decorations and is accompanied by a gingerbread christmas tree and candy wreath.

The house comes setup for a super pitched roof, which just wasn't going to work for us. For the butterfly roof profile, I made a quick modification to the front and back gingerbread pieces of the house. The resultant leftover gingerbread pieces allowed us to improvise an additional entry feature and chimney. Having built nice clean architectural models, I have to say the icing as glue proves a little sloppy, but the smaller the hole in the icing bag, the more control you end up developing as you go along.

Although I'm a minimalist at heart, this house is all about decoration, and we used every bit of the decorative candies in one way or another. We made sure to provide the quintessential center mounted doorknob, clerestory windows, and sculpture garden. The whole project was decorated on the fly, trying to proportion and use all the pieces was a good challenge and also a lot of fun. Perhaps next year we will try to do a custom one from scratch.