Up on the Rooftop Gingerbread House

This is the first year I have created a gingerbread house using my own design. I joked with my Facebook friends that my experience working for an interior design firm and architecture firm all those years prepared me for gingerbread house design. I started by constructing a cardstock model of the home I wanted to create- one with lots of windows and a stone fireplace. To see how I created this gingerbread house, continue reading...

After measuring and cutting and figuring out roof lines and taping it all together, I undid it all to use each piece as a template for the gingerbread baking:

Here is the chilled gingerbread dough reading to roll. I made one batch for the entire house with plenty extra.

When you roll out sides that need to match up, it is important to roll your gingerbread out between two pieces of parchment paper. You don't want to lift or shift the gingerbread once you have it cut in the shape of the template:

It is best to make any cut-outs prior to baking. I used a small square cookie cutter to cut the windows. Carefully remove the cut out and clean up the edges. I used a toothpick and Xacto knife to help smooth the sides- the better you tidy it up here, the less work later to shave it off.

Here is the gingerbread all baked and cooling. It took about 4hrs total to mix the dough and bake all of the gingerbread pieces.

This gingerbread house is decorated from the inside out, so I piped white royal icing on all of the interior walls.

After allowing the royal icing to set overnight, I flipped the pieces around to pipe stone on the lower section of the exterior walls. The stone is just royal icing piped in the random shapes of stones.

After the stones set overnight, I painted them with food coloring- a little black/brown/yellow/pink. Painting on royal icing is a lot like water color painting. My first idea for the stone was to make small gum paste stones and then I realized how long it would take to shape, dry, arrange, attach, etc. The royal icing was perfect and looked very realistic.

Here is the interior wall of the stone fireplace. First, I piped and filled the wall- leaving the space of the stone fireplace- and filling in a square for the fire. As you can see below, I painted the fire & logs first and then painted black around the fire. Then I filled in the stones up to the ceiling and hand painted the stones with the food coloring.

That's as far as I got before we took off for my sister's for an early Thanksgiving with my entire immediate family...all 31 of us!

Next up, the gum paste figures. I am going to break this up into a couple of posts, so stay tuned for more instruction on how to create this gingerbread house from the inside, out, and what I did with the house!

Take a peek through the windows- this gingerbread house comes fully furnished! The next step of the gingerbread house construction after baking the pieces and decorating the interior and exterior walls was creating the gum paste figures including Santa, the spilled packages from Santa's bag, the dog, furniture, rocks and logs.

I was able to bring a few supplies with me to work to make Santa at my desk. I colored some gum paste red, black and flesh tone. I started with Santa's head- making a round ball and then shaping the head. Next, I poked two holes for the eyes and sculpted a mouth. Then I placed a small ball for his nose and added the white mustache, beard and eyebrows. Last was a strip of hair around the back of his head and small round balls for his ears. Then on to his body- shaping shoes, two legs, & torso.

Then I added the white fur trim to the legs and waist, the belt & buckle and lastly, the arms with white fur trim and the gloves.

I loved Santa's bald head so much that I couldn't cover it up with a hat, so I made a hat to set next him in the snow. My original idea was to have Santa on the roof in the sleigh, but with his gaze turned up, he needed to be down in the snow. A co-worker gave me the idea to make it appear as though he slid off the roof and is looking back up like "now what".

Here are the other gum paste accents. The wrapped presents were so much fun to make. I actually build little boxes with a few of them. The bows were easier than expected. I took a ball of gum paste and smooshed it into a triangle- pinching the point and then took a pair of scissors and cut 3 slits for the bow. Wrap the package with a thin strip for the ribbon and attach the bow by pressing the point with a sharp tool. The small brown pieces above the packages are the legs of the chair.

Below, you'll see how I made the trees. There is a decorated tree in the center of the room inside the house and trees with lights on the exterior of the house. I covered the sugar cone with green royal icing to make sure the frosting would stick as I piped tree branches and placed round sprinkles.

Time to set the walls! After setting the walls with royal icing, I rolled out a very thin piece of wood grain looking gum paste for the hard wood floors and then placed the decorated Christmas tree, presents, table with bowls/spoons/cups, stools, chair, and coffee table with gifts. This was probably the most fun part- I felt like I was playing with a dollhouse!

Then I just filled in the scenery- adding the snow covered ground- leaving a walk way- and the creek, placing the rocks and more trees.

Santa still needed a sleigh and Rudolph on top of the roof, so I paused here to decorate the reindeer and sleigh cookies with my niece and nephew who came over to help. The sleigh was made 3D by placing a small square cookie (size of the window cutouts) in the front and back of 2 cookies. Rudolph is double-sided as well.

I had the kids watch me as I decorated the sleigh and reindeer and they took over with their own cookies.

I am so impressed with how well they did using royal icing for the first time!

Santa's bag is brown colored gum paste rolled thin in the shape of a circle. I placed the rolled gum paste on my palm and filled the bag with small pieces of baked gingerbread to look like packages in the bag. Gather the bag around the gingerbread pieces. Then I used a tool to make a stitching pattern around the top of the bag.

Next, I'll share the interior shots and exterior shots looking in to the gingerbread house.

Before the rooftop assembly, I took the gingerbread house outside to snap a few photos as the sun was just rising. It had snowed a good 3-4" over night. The next photo makes me want to move into the house and curl up by the fire to admire the almost floor-to-ceiling decorated Christmas tree.

Breakfast is already on the table: porridge and hot cocoa. It's hard to tell, but the spoons are even hand painted with edible silver spray. The tables and stools are baked gingerbread. The rest of the accents are made from gum paste.

From the outside, looking in:

The back of the gingerbread house. The string of lights around the house were made by piping a string of green frosting the carefully placing candy coated mini-chips with tweezers. It's not easy to grip that shiny finish with tweezers!