housing for all

i was absolutely enchanted by these tiny gingerbread cookie houses, because after all, i am a sucker. a total and complete sucker. and after reading that blog post and marveling at the cuteness of the pictures, i decided i had to make some. had. to.

but i'm not enough of a glutton for punishment to do it completely from scratch. i still had half a tub of dough left over from decorating cookies with the bean and the teen, plus a tube of ready-made gingerbread dough just chillin' in the fridge. and i always have the ingredients for royal icing in the pantry, so i was good to go. i printed the template from the website onto a piece of cardstock and cut out the pieces:

rolled out some sugar cookie dough on a piece of foil:

and started cutting pieces out with a paring knife.

i'd only cut out about two houses' worth of pieces when the bean decided she was bored and wanted some attention. she hadn't yet had a nap, so i set the stuff aside and snuggled with her on the couch until she fell asleep.

once she was peacefully snoozing under a comfy blanket, i slid off of the couch carefully and went back to work. it was a pain in the ass to cut those pieces out and pull out the excess dough from around them, but i managed. i found that rolling the dough between two pieces of foil and then sticking it in the fridge to firm up again made it easier, though.

i also found that the dough puffed up considerably in the oven and lost most of its shape. eff. i ended up having to re-cut the pieces using the templates after pulling them out of the oven. gah!

but by the time i got to the final sheet of baked foundation pieces, i was over it. i trimmed enough to make the doorways and left the rest of them as-is.

i mixed up the "cement" and put it in a ziploc, and then snipped a corner off.

gluing the pieces together was pretty easy, and they fit together perfectly. whee!

not too bad, right?

i looked at the website again, and when i compared the originals to my sad little attempts, it was like driving from millionaire row into shantytown. oh, well. in no time, i had a entire village of little ghetto cookie houses lined up on my tray.

once they were all assembled, i started decorating to make them a little more festive-looking.

they looked a little better than before, right?

before we scooted out to christmas eve service at church, i perched one on the rim of a coffee mug to see how it fit. and then i squealed and clapped my hands with glee at my handiwork. dork.

after church, i scurried into the kitchen to grab something, turned around - and then the unthinkable happened:

i yelped so loudly that the teen came running out. "you knocked them all over, didn't you?" thank goodness it was just one casualty - not the entire dozen. that would have sucked in the biggest way. my little village was still mostly intact.

after that, i got and stayed out of the kitchen before i did any more damage. sheesh.