Last weekend we hosted a family gingerbread house party at our place. It was something we thought up during a dinner the week before that we all agreed would be a cool way to get in the holiday spirit! We all discussed and came up with our ideas of what we wanted to build (my sister planned a holiday camper, Wren wanted to do a log cabin, and Sean wanted to do a holiday car repair shop LOL, and grandpa just decided to watch us all work). I decided on a New Orleans theme, and the best (and easiest) structure for a novice like myself would be a creole cottage.

We did a run to Bulk Barn the night before for all our various candies, and at noon on Saturday we began with making a large supply of dough. By dinner we had made and baked all our pieces and after dinner we began assembling!

chocolate wafers for the roof, spearmint leaves for my tree, Bazooka Bubblegum for my sidewalk and front steps, and various gummies and hard candies for decoration.

A little royal icing and a sprinkle of coconut over the whole thing made it a white Christmas, not the setting you'd expect a creole cottage to be in!

I made the bottle brush trees a couple weeks ago with some green ones I got at the dollar store, you just have to bleach them then put them in some water with fabric dye for a couple minutes to get them any colour you like! It was super fast and easy.

I definitely have some room for improvement on my piping skills, but it was overall really really easy to design (the secret is to add dormers to most standard gingerbread house shapes). We had so much fun planning and making our houses and laughed when they just wouldn't cooperate, and in the end it didn't matter how they turned out.

Journal

My New Orleans Christmas