For this year I have a brand new gingerbread house!! With the help of my long suffering friend Ileana we created a gingerbread Grand Overlook Hotel complete with rice crispy hedge maze and little frozen Jack.
Last year I found that my card stock patterns didn't fit together nearly as well once baked out of gingerbread because I hadn't accounted for the thickness. So this year I decided to make my model out of cardboard to better simulate the gingerbread. I created a plan of all the pieces I thought I'd need and started my model with the left wing wall setting the scale for the rest. I made the rest of the left wing pieces to a scale that looked right based on pictures. The right wing was a little smaller so I cut an inch off height, no parapet outcrops but I used the same roof pattern for it's own little roof outcrops. The last thing I built was the middle stating with a cardboard place holder for the floor which I used as is in the final building. After my model was complete I took apart the pieces and sprayed them with a canvas coating to help seal the cardboard from the grease of the cookie dough.
Next there was a whole night of baking and cutting, cooling and sorting. The next morning we started assembly. For this project I had the idea of doing a bunch of line piping to give the building the appearance of paneling, I also though this would be best done while they were flat. That took some time to dry completely and so we assembled other pieces to dry while we waited.
We got to about here in assembly when we realized the back walls were too low and that the right center roof panel didn't fit at all. We did a little re-baking and cut our roof panel on the fly while it cooled.
It was worth it though, and with a final few hours of decorating.
And the hour Ileana spent putting the maze together. We had an AMAZING (haunted) gingerbread hotel.
Which Bob was nice enough to take off my hands for his Messiah party which meant it actually got eaten and enjoyed ^^
