The Gingerbread Incident of 2013

         Sometimes we underestimate our abilities, in this case, I overestimated them. Due to a wealth of gingerbread pictures online,my sister, Kenna, and I decided that if the internet could do it then we could obviously do it. For years we had wanted to build a gingerbread house and enter it in the Christmas Fair but she was never home soon enough so we could meet the deadline until....SURPRISE! I walked into my closet and there she was, hiding behind my jackets. She had come home early and finally we could build our fabled gingerbread house.
        We set to work brainstorming, looking up every picture and recipe we could find, and buying ingredients before finally deciding on the crown jewel of gingerbread.......buses? What could be more unique, never before seen, and wonderful as a London Tour bus complete with gummy bear passengers and oreo wheels. Sounds wonderful right? Well it started well, we sketched our picture(yes, I'm quite the artist)

           

          We got out our ingredients and...

Secret Gingerbread Recipe off the internet....

          mixed them up in not-so-record time...

We discovered molasses is terrible.

            And finally our gingerbread was out of the oven.....seemingly perfect. We were having fun, feeling good, and ready to start frosting. However, Problem #1 hit: London tour buses are red and you can't make red frosting out of pink-tinted food dye. So our gingerbread was put off until the next day, when we could acquire red frosting dye and thank goodness it worked!
           

It was then that the gingerbread montage began. from 7:00 to 11: 00 we frosted every inch of our gingerbread bus and then Problem #2 hit: The lights went out. Of all the nights for such a thing to happen! Mid-glue, we were swamped in darkness and left to fumble about as we tried to glue a bus together at 12:00 at night. Then Problem #3 hit: Our 'seemingly perfect gingerbread'? Yah, not so perfect and apparently too thick because frosting wasn't holding it together anytime soon. And that brings us to Problem #4: After two different recipes, and way too much powdered sugar,we had to give in, our frosting wouldn't stick. So long story short, at almost 2:00 in the morning we gave up on our gingerbread-coated dreams and went to sleep leaving a very sketchy gingerbread house bus left sitting on the table. 

Take note of the personalized license plate J & K

Our gingerbread bus at its best

 But by morning it had depleted to this...

     And when I got home from school, this...

     Now you would think we would be done with gingerbread but not just yet... we had gingerbread men to frost ASAP! Luckily, those went much better then the bus and we now have the 11th Doctor Who, Olly Murs, and all of One Direction because they are all ridiculously British of course! 

Little Frosting buttons almost as cute as gumdrops

From left to right: Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Lilac Niall, Liam Payne, Louis(the child) Tomlinson, Olly Murs, The Tardis, and Matt Smith: The 11th Doctor.

     Although, I have no idea about Doctor Who or the doctors, or the Tardis...we still had a wonderful and interesting time making way too much gingerbread and we've finally learned out lesson: We actually DON'T want to make a gingerbread house, we just want to keep thinking about making one with the skills we don't actually have... I hope everyone has had a wonderful December so far and I'd love to see your holiday creations! Jewel.