Winter Wonderland Gingerbread House

With all the snow from Nemo, I thought it might be a good time to post the snowy gingerbread bread house my mother and I made over the holidays.

For the first time, we made the gingerbread house from scratch and cut out the pieces! And of coruse, if I'm going to go through the trouble of making the gingerbread and cutting the pieces, it's going to be more than just a little square house. Below is a front view of our Victorian-style gingerbread cottage.  

We used Sweetopia's simple, delicious, and sturdy gingerbread recipe and scaled up this amazing pattern by 100%

Here's a closeup of the front. The Roof is made of those delicious Pirouette Chocolate cookies (so hard to keep from eating them!) And the door is marshmallow. The mailbox is a white chocolate coated wafer cookie on a green candy stick and the little gold balls are edible sugar dragees.

And here's the back view. Little baby peanut butter cups as decoration along the roof, a marshmallow chimny, and green m&m's (the mint flavor) along the back. Plus dragees for a little more sparkle  

Ice cream cone trees (take a pointy cone, turn it over, and pipe green textured frosting on) and a pond in the back. We found these cute gummy candies as decoration and used Amy's graham cracker bunnies to give the scene some life.  Can you find the set of bunnies who are well, particularly loving?

The pond is jolly rancher - we crushed them up, put them in a pile/circle on tinfoil, and watched the like a hawk as they were melting in the oven. Once they cooled, it was just a matter of peeling off the pond and plopping it into the board.

The ice-skating marks were made by running a wet paintbrush over the pond after it had been (accidentally over-dusted) in powdered sugar.

No winter gingerbread scene would be complete without a snowman. See the little pretzel fence in the back ground? That fence kept falling over, but we finally got it to almost stay up...

Jelly beans along the side.  We bought the candy a few days after Christmas when it was all on sale!

And the whole back view. The snow on top is powdered sugar and, on top of the roof, roral icing smeared on thick.

The front bay is lined with Mike & Ike's as well as green chewy disks. Not sure what brand they were, but they were definitely delicious. The walkway is made of mini peanut butter cups and cut-up cinnamon and chocolate marshmallows. I didn't even know they made marshmallows in those flavors and sold them at the supermarket; must have been a seasonal thing.

The windows, by the way, were made using that same crushed jolly ranchers method. I cut the holes for the windows before baking and cleaned them up more right after the gingerbread came out of the oven. Once the giant cookies has cooled, I sprinkles the jolly rancher pieces in the holes and popped them back in the over for a bit until they had melted. It's hard to see because there's no light in the house,but the effect was really cool and looked like beautiful stained glass. 

 
And the front view once more.  With every year comes a new gingerbread house. I'd better start thinking about how to top this one!