Gingerbread Houses

This is a family tradition that I grew up with. Every year we made gingerbread houses. My mom always made the gingerbread from scratch and the whole family would decorate them. Then they would be put on display for a month before we were allowed to eat them if we still wanted to. While I've mostly continued this tradition with my kids, this is the first year that I made my own gingerbread. That wasn't as easy as I expected, but it turned out good. And because I waited to make them until a week before Christmas they weren't even very dusty by the time the kids were allowed to eat them.
This is the kids just getting started. I would've liked to have Stewart and I make them too, but I didn't have enough molasses to make that much gingerbread.

Each of the kids posed with their finished pieces before going to bed while I put the houses together.




Here's the finished product. Left to right are Caleb's, Liz's, Josh's, and Sammie's.

Thankfully my mom's icing recipe really gets hard because even though the gingerbread was hard when they were decorating, with all the humidity here it actually softened a lot in the week that they were on display.