This year I did more gingerbread house making than all years combined! My first opportunity was on December 18th when a group from my church made gingerbread houses with the residents of Adam House, a refugee shelter in the west end. We had it pretty easy because we used a bunch of gingerbread house making sets that have ready-made pieces, icing, and candy all ready to go. We split up into four teams and each made something different. Some groups made the standard house, and others (my group being one of them) started cutting pieces and doing different things with them. It was a fun time! I invited my couch-surfer Ashley to join us since it was also a new experience for her. The winning team was the one that had “Adam House” printed on it!
My next and more hard-core gingerbread experience happened the very next day because my friends Jacky, Rachel, and Vikkie had decided to get together and make a house from scratch! What’s more is that we decided to try and make the house from the Disney Pixar movie “Up”. That morning I went to the store and then baked the dough. It was fun to just chill, listen to Christmas music, and do that part on my own. Then in the mid-afternoon I met up with Joy and we took the bus to Markham to have dinner and finish the house at Rachel’s house. Vikkie found a template for the “Up” house online which was a real help and so Vikkie, Joy and I rolled and baked the pieces while Rachel and Jacky prepared hot pot. We had hot pot together last year and so now it has become a tradition. While we ate dinner we watched the classic film “White Christmas”. I had forgot how many witty quotes that movie has! We didn’t start putting the house together until 9pm and we were at it until 12:30 in the morning when Joy and I had to leave to grab the last bus back to downtown! It took longer than expected to put together because we had some structural problems with our roof. We had baked them too thin and so ended up putting them back in the oven for a while and then sticking them outside to cool to make them stronger! The only thing we didn’t get to was the balloons that we wanted to make coming out of the chimney just like in the movie. First we were going to make a structure out of gingerbread and stick jelly beans on it but then the others had the idea of trying to stick the jelly beams to a balloon. It got too heavy though and soon it deflated into one big sticky mess! We all decided that rice crispy squares would have been the way to go! The house was a real masterpiece overall, though we all decided we had been far to ambitious as usual! Because we had to leave before it was finished, Rachel put the finishing touches on it on her own and sent us a final photograph. Now we are all gingerbread house-making pros!
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