My First Ever Gingerbread House

At work on Friday myself and two of my coworkers went across the street to the Westin for a little holiday event they were having for some of the people they partner with throughout the year. We had a great lunch prepared by their head chef and then went directly into the fiercest competition I’ve been a part of in a while… The Fourth Annual Gingerbread House Decorating Competition!

I’ve never made a gingerbread house before… at least that I remember doing, so I was a little nervous going into it, but then realized that I pretty much was on an all-star team with my co-workers Gayle and Lauren. Gayle went to culinary school and is a master with a pastry bag… she was our designated piper and Lauren is one of the more creative people I know and has an awesome eye for what looks good so we were in business! Also, luckily the houses were already constructed for us. Yes, I did go to Purdue but was frowned upon when I made my way over to the engineering side of the campus and I knew that if I would have had to make my own house it would have never stood the test of time!

The array of candy and items that we could choose from was pretty impressive. We dug right into the marshmallow, frosted mini-wheats, pretzels, mike and ikes, dots, jolly ranchers, m&m’s, and of course, I ate just as many goodies and I put on the house and by the end of the afternoon my belly was hurting from licking my fingers that were full of icing.

We started with the roof and once we had the thatched look we were going for there was no stopping us! We decorated the house very tastefully with wreaths and pretty windows and snow around the edges, but we really concentrated on the house’s accessories more. We had a beautiful tree outside with ornaments and a star on top, and snowman, and a sleigh carrying packages. Of course since I grew up in a house heated mainly by the wood stove I decided this needed to be a part of the gingerbread house. We stacked up pretzels outside for a wood pile and then added marshmallows coming out of the chimney to look like smoke, and to top it all off we hammered in an address sign right outside the front porch “875” was the number of course, the address for the John Hancock Building. It looked great and we were very proud of it. The judging finally took place and (drumroll please!) we came in second place! We knew going in that the girls from The American Girl store have won the past couple of years and they won again this year. They had reindeer pulling their sleigh for goodness sake! So after we decided that our team MVP was Gayle because she was the professional piper, we came to the conclusion that we needed to start researching houses for next year! WE WILL WIN!!