Gingerbread house

.

In our area, the church hosts a gingerbread display every year. Each ward can submit a display and this year, James and I decided to help with our ward's, so I volunteered to make a gingerbread house. Now, I can't just seem to do the bare minimum, so I decided we were going to do a gingerbread church (mostly because I wanted to use melted candy in the windows). Well, that was a bit of a mistake. The church turned out okay, but it's a poor church with many holes in the seams and well, it's a bit tipsy. . .

I took some "before" pictures. As you can see the church leans just a bit and the steeple, well, the steeple is lucky it stayed a steeple and didn't get changed into a chimney.

I had some extra jolly ranchers and dough, so I decided to make a little pond.

 James decorated the pond all by himself while I was putting frosting on the seams of the church. I think he has a talent.

 And here's the finished church. Decorating it helped a bit. Okay, decorating helped a lot.

Amelia wasn't too keen on decorating the houses. Most of the candy is really old (we're talking 2008 expiration on one bag of pretzels) and she wasn't too happy that nobody would give her any candy or crackers to eat when there was so much around. Our little beggar would walk up to about anyone and ask "peeese, peeese" and she got denied every time. After about 10 or so minutes of begging, she did give up  and found a toy or two to play with

 

*Yes, those shingles got put on the wrong way. It's a good thing I went into  law and not construction.