Last week I attended an event at Sur La Table in Newport Beach, CA. If you haven’t been to Sur La Table, you should run there. And if you don’t have one locally, they have a catalog and website. My husband loves this place. We were going to be decorating gingerbread houses for Discovery Science Center’s “The Science of Gingerbread” event.
A group of local Orange County Bloggers were invited to decorate these gingerbread houses for the contest that the Discovery Science Center is hosting. I’m glad that someone finally understood “The Julie” and pre-made the houses. I’m all for decorating, but I have past failures with actually “building” the gingerbread houses. I learned that the secret to the stucco for gingerbread houses is using royal icing.
We started with these beautiful wrapped houses. Seriously, undecorated, they are pretty. I was afraid to remove the wrapping.
And then we were provided with this loveliness. I had to refrain from eating the decorations. It was very difficult to not eat, just a few pieces.
Of course, when it came to decorating the actual house, I had to make a plan of attack. I can never do things the easy way. I had to examine my resources (the candy), and plan out my hardscape and landscape. Yes, I have some OCD issues. Let’s just say that it took quite some time just working on the roof.
I decided that I did not want a traditional gingerbread house theme, and went with a more California type house. I refrained from adding snow (coconut) everywhere and put grass (green frosting) around my house. Those Tootsie Roll and pretzel combinations are supposed to be palm trees, just imagine they are.
So after an hour an a half of decorating, I was done. Ok, maybe I had to walk away from the house before it turned into a mess. I left it very sterile and neat, but somewhat pretty, right? And my snowman type thing, well, it looks like an owl.
I had a fun time, and promised myself to never decorate a gingerbread house without professional help again. There are some things that I should just stay away from. Here are some pictures of the other houses that were made that night. We all had different degrees of creativity.
And while we decorating these gingerbread houses, we had some lovely cupcakes from Divine Desserts. I heard that they served some delicious hot chocolate too, but I had already over caffeinated myself while on my way to the event.
If you want to visit my lovely gingerbread house, and many more between November 26, 2010-January 2, 2011. There are a ton of events going on for this special event during the Holidays. Check Discovery Science Center’s website for actual date and time listings.
Disclosure: I was invited to an event at Sur La Table and it was also sponsored by the Discovery Science Center. I ate some cupcakes from Divine Desserts and took some photographs with my Nikon camera. I edited the photographs with Picnik on my Macbook computer. I may have borrowed an event logo from Discovery Science Center.
