The perfect house?

by The buckland familly
(England)

here are the houses together

we had been making simple gingerbread house for a couple of years starting off with a kit and then last year we made one ourselves, happy with our the handiwork we put it on display in our dining room. when a friend of ours saw it and started a competition with the idea his competitive nature would be enough to beat our small amounts of experience

so when it came to the middle of November we began to stock up of a huge variety of sweets and chocolate as well as icing supplies

so we made the plans and started baking the gingerbread, in the meantime the mathematicians of the family (the men)worked out the angles. it was a little soggy so after being cut out the walls had to go back into the oven. And... now we could construct a miniature masterpiece. So we iced the board and up it went, we did it was working splendidly,we even had started to stick sweets on the corners put in the stain glass windows. Our choice of roofing material was chocolate buttons and dad used his actual tiling experience to make a wonderful affect and at the bridge of the roof we added a line of Jazzies alternating the colours of chocolate. We made a idyllic little porch held up with candy canes and tiled with more Jazzies. we were all ready to hang up the icing bag for the night and leave the final decorative touches for the competition day.

but then the catastrophe struck... the walls began to bow the roof started to sink. we had to act fast our culinary craftsmanship was collapsing in front of our very eyes, a quick discussion decided it would have to come apart. we took the end wall off! And had a mad run around the house to find something house shaped . We settled for a Panettone (still in box which we had been given as a early Christmas present a couple of day previous ) with a box of water biscuit crackers with a cardboard triangle on top the side wall stayed on relatively easy one we baked it yet again. Once firmly stuck together we finally went to bed all very tired and slightly annoyed about the unfortunately soft gingerbread.

The next day we finished it all off with quite a few more sweets and replacing a few tile broken in construction amendments. And now for the competition. we had arranged that we would cook them dinner and then the houses would be unveiled. Unfortunately our judge was otherwise occupied. So our idea of bribery wasn't going to work it was all up to the families.

On the night we had a great time theirs looked really good but they had a completely different take on it to us. We never really got round to choosing a winner so have a look at the photo of them both and see what you reckon. I would like to thank everyone for the help with the houses,and particularly the judge for creating the gingerbread medals (in the shape of little houses with windows and everything) for prizes. It was great fun I would recommend it to anyone creative or not!