Candy Dish Blog

As you can tell, Rosa’s gingerbread house is in a pretty good area of town. Her gingerpeople residents made snowpeople decorations for the front yard and keep the place well-decorated and looking very nice. Go check out more of her pictures. When I lived in Worcester, MA, I lived in a neighborhood that looked a bit like this, except less tasty to eat:

Have you made a gingerbread house? Leave a link in the comments. We want to see the photos!

The nice thing about gingerbread houses is that you don’t need to be an architect to design them and they take up very little real estate to build one. Plus, there has never been a better time to own a gingerbread house than right now. Even in this economy we can all afford this sweet little treat mansion.

Do you like making these? Some families have a whole tradition of making them together. This is also a great activity for a party. My friend Jody used to add an element of friendly competition to her gingerbread house parties by dividing us into groups and having us try to build the most creative structure. The winners always got something fun as a prize and the competitiveness drove us to pull out all the stops. The “residents” of the houses were gummy bears and had to be featured somehow, and the houses did not have to make structural sense, as long as they could be held together with icing. It was great fun.

Send us a photo or a link to a picture of your gingerbread house and we will post it here. Here’s how we do it at NCA.

Gingerbread Recipe

Ingredients:

• 6 cups all purpose flour
• 1 3/4 cups sugar
• 2/3 cups shortening
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 eight-ounce container sour cream
• 2 eggs

Directions
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