Per my personal tradition, I wanted to make a gingerbread house from scratch. I dragged Debbie and Claire into it, invited our AmeriCorps Habitat friends and before you knew it, it was a bit party and competition! Claire and her boyfriend decorate a house each year and compete against two other friends. She wanted to make a contest out of our little decoration party so it started to get pretty intense once everyone gathered at her house. Claire and I had a lot of Friday off work so we made the gingerbread from a recipe we found online. There were a lot and I wasn't sure which to go with, but after a lot of researching I decided on one that sounded good. We got the ingredients and once the dough was finished, we refrigerated it until Sunday.
Claire and Debbie getting goofy with all the decorations!
We had all sorts of things: chocoalte chips, white chocolate chips, powdered sugar, gummy bears, goji berries (nontraditional but very red), dried coconut flakes (note for next year: get thin and small shredded coconut) and much much more!
They are TOO mcuh fun!
We broke our competitors into two groups: the Dream team, from Colorado "I Have a Dream" (plus Debbie), versus Habitat (four AmeriCorps from Habitat for Humanity). The Habitat team has a lot of technical skill, but us Dreamers hav ea lot of creativity. Here are the Dreamers getting to work with the cut, cooked and cooled pieces, trying to attach them with cement into a houselike structure.
Once the Habitat team got down to work, I knew we were going to be in trouble. They pulled out a ruler, started talking in "construction lingo" and I got nervous. They were talking angles, proportions and energy efficiency. The Dream team preparation involved lots of drawing but very little if any measurement!
Nate made a beautiful Christmas tree out of uncooked gingerbread dough. Hand made, it took quite a while. Their team was VERY atune to details.
I don't know why this photo didn't rotate but as you can see, it is Claire showing off one of HER lovely Christmas trees made of different gooey, green candies stacked on top of themselves.
So this was the Dream team's final product: a tent village. Our house was too thick and we coudn't figure out a way to get it to stand up on its own. We came up with the idea of putting hte pieces together into tent-shape structures. We decorated them individually and then came up with a story of what happened: the gummy bears that live in the forrest were invaded by humans who wanted to create a development and ruin the bears' homes. The bears attacked and took back their habitat. A close up view of this village would show lots of bears with tooth-pick weapons perched to attack if need be. Sounds sad but it was a pretty good outcome for the bears!
And then came the Habitat home: what a masterpiece if I do say so myself!
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The goji berries made perfect bricks. They even had a frosty the snowman!
My proudest part was the igloo in our tent village. We had lots of little gingerbread bricks for one reason or another so I used them to create a gingerbread igloo!! Best one I've ever seen
The picture in the back was my drawing of a gingerbread igloo. The structure in the front left is my actual igloo. Pretty close to my imagined igloo :D
We even came up with a list of categories to be scored by: Lighting, Landscaping, house Structure, Creativity, Debbie Likes It (1 point) and Christmas Spirit. We had Tina (Claire's roomie and AmeriCorps with "I Have a Dream" who was very unbiased) to make the final vote. She gave Habitat the ribbon for best house structure and gave the Dream Team the ribbon for creativity. Go everyone!
What a wonderful way to bring some Christmas spirit to the first weekend in December!!!!
Merry Christmas Charlie Brown :D
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