You know it's bad when you can't make a prefab gingerbread house...

I bought my first computer when I was 16. I know, it's an odd way to start a Halloween post, but just hang with me for a bit. I'd actually had a computer since I was 5, but I wanted one of my own. I got a job and saved up some money, but Mom and Dad said I had to buy a desk for my room first so I'd have somewhere to put the new toy.

So I got this desk on sale at Office Depot and proceeded to put it together in the middle of the living room floor. It had (has, actually- it's the desk that's now in my scrap room) these filing cabinet drawers that I proceeded to put together exactly backwards. Apparently inserting Tab A into Slot B was just beyond my skillset at the time. My Dad commented that it was a good thing I didn't want to be an engineer. Funny thing is, now I am an engineer, but instead of building physical stuff, I build software. Good thing I got that computer, huh?

Last night I tried to build my first ever gingerbread house. I got this great looking kit from Michaels. All the pieces were already in the box and baked and all the candy was included. I just had to follow the directions. And there was no Tab A to be inserted into Slot B, so I should have been just fine. Right? Wrong. Oh, so wrong.

It all started out well, all the pieces of the kit were there and the instructions were in (mostly) plain English.


I mixed the frosting according to the directions on the package, and it seemed to do pretty well. (I included this next photo mostly to show Mom that I do actually use my mixer sometimes.) :-)


Then I put some of the icing into these little piping bags that came with the kit. It was shortly after this that everything began to break down. The icing was very thick and hard to squeeze out of the tubes.


Despite that, I managed to get two of the walls together with surprisingly little effort.


The other two walls went up fairly easily, too, but the icing started getting really, really hard to work with. It just didn't want to come out of the bag, and when it did, it didn't want to stick to the gingerbread.


But, despite those difficulties, I still got the roof on. It was when I started trying to spread the icing onto the roof tiles that the trouble really started. It just did not want to spread. At all. So I ended up with this lumpy looking sheet of frosting instead of a nice, smooth roof.

And this is as far as it got. In theory, I was supposed to be able to squeeze lines of icing around the "rafters" and then stick candy in as decorations. But, as I'd previously mentioned the icing refused to stick to the gingerbread after I coaxed it out of the bag, so that didn't work. I fought the urge to go get a box of Glue Dots and start sticking stuff on with those.

So, structurally I have a very sound gingerbread house, it's just rather plain looking.


The pumpkin turned out nicely, though. I picked the pattern. :-)



Happy Halloween, everyone!!