The Great Gingerbread Farm

A month later this post is finally here! Oh wait, is that because there's an exam in two days.... ;)

This year my mom told me she wanted to do a gingerbread replica of our house during my winter break. This seemed like a great idea until we realized how much flour we needed to accomplish this task. Let alone how many pieces we would have to cut to even make the task feasible (we live in a cape). Instead, we settled on a gingerbread farm! Here is the finished product below:

 

This isn't really going to be a tutorial since there are so many different ways to decorate, but I wanted to blog about it just to share how fun the project was!

Design
I used printer paper and traced out pieces that we could put on our dough for templates. I'm sorry I don't have a printable template... I am definitely not technically advanced enough to get that thing on the computer... haha. There are a few gingerbread farm blog posts out there though and a few do have printable templates!

Dough and Icing
The recipe for the dough we used can be found here. I know it's not true gingerbread since there's no ginger in it but we needed something that would harden so we can keep this thing for a few years. The recipe calls for dark or light corn syrup but we were short on both so we combined dark and light. We made the dough three days ago and it is like a freaking brick. You could probably break somebody's face with it haha. 

The frosting is similarly stiff; the recipe for that can be found here. The recipe calls for meringue powder which you can find in the cake decorating section of the Wal-Mart, but if you can't find it you can substitute egg whites (because that's really what it is anyway). 

Supposedly you're supposed to use gel food coloring so it doesn't dilute out the icing but we kinda missed that memo and used the liquid drops you can find in the spice aisle of your grocery store. 

To make the barn red we added a ton of red food coloring to a small bowl of white icing until it was as dark as we wanted. Then we took a paint brush - yes, a paint brush - and painted it onto the front, back, and sides of the barn as well as the pieces for the cupola and the chicken coop. It actually dried a lot darker than we expected which was nice.

Note - Most of the stuff on this house we intended to be non-edible so we could store it and take it out for years to come!

Photos and Decorations! 

Our template:

Assembly!

The finished roof! Made out of frosted mini-wheats.

Making Decorations while the roof sets.. The wreathes were made with circular pieces of cardboard and a leaf cake decorating tip. The pearls are edible sugar. The trees were made on sugar cones that we cut down to different sizes and then used a star tip on! The belted Galloway was made with a cookie cutter and colored frosting.

After addition of the snow and all the decorations!

Hope you enjoyed this as much as we did!