Gingerbread, Anyone?

"Hey," Charles said. "Why don't you build a gingerbread house? It'd be something to do with Iain over the break."

Ok. Obtained kit (it's basically two molds for the gingerbread dough, two pastry bags, and two recipes - gingerbread and royal icing). Mixed dough. Pressed dough into silicon molds. Baked. Cooled. Unmolded.

Then Iain and I visited the toy store at the Grand America Hotel. Aside from its magical displays of robots, dolls, and dinosaurs, the store contains a "Candy Organ." Essentially, it's a dispenser with towering tubes of hard candy and a musical base. You step onto the base and it plays music, then hold your bag under a spigot and the organ pours candy into the bag.

Iain chose yellow ducks, green chocolate balls, blue and white M&Ms, extra-large red-hots, and candy-coated raisins in various colors.

Then we hit Harmon's for peppermints, candy canes, dark chocolate M&Ms, and Skittles.

Finally, we mixed up a batch of royal icing, filled the bag (thank you, pastry set gift received ten years ago - I love to use you), and began to decorate. As you can see, we covered the roof, lined all the windows, filled the eaves with duckies, built and stocked a pond, initiated a snowball fight between our gingerbread siblings, set up a fence (good fences make good neighbors!), and pretended not to notice how many bits of candy disappeared into Iain's maw.

Dad turns out to have impressive piping skills. Who knew?