Last Year's Champs

 My sister Silvie and I did all the baking and assembly. We’ve been baking together since we were little, but our gingerbread house building experience was pretty much limited to the graham cracker variety up to that point. My sister’s fiancé, Pat, helped us with the lighting and electrical, but wiring tiny strands of miniature Christmas lights was a first for him as well. All in all, we were a bunch of rookies!

Silvie is definitely more detail oriented, whereas I’m big picture. I was responsible for the main structures and Silvie took control of the tiny details that really made the theme come to life. Pat was on his own with the lighting (electrical engineering isn’t our strong suit). There was definitely a lot of teamwork to pull the whole thing together though.

Between the three of us, we spent many hours on the house. We both live in apartments with relatively small kitchens, so we took over our parent’s house for a week or so. The entire main floor was covered in powdered sugar and gingerbread crumbs, but it gave us a meeting place to work together. An entire weekend and every evening after work got the job done. It was hectic, but a lot of fun.

The Vancouver 24hrs newspaper was our corporate sponsor. We were fortunate in that they gave us full creative reign. We actually had a lot of fun incorporating their logo into our theme, who doesn’t love seeing elves reading the morning paper?

It really felt amazing to see how much support we got from voters, especially considering how amazing the other entries were! The prize money was just the cherry on top of what was already such a great experience in support of such a worthy cause. We really wish we could always win prizes for spending hours eating candy and playing with dough (because we would be rich)! 

Two words; festive moose. 

Get a great team together and make sure you have a clear vision of what you want your house to look like. It’s easy to get carried away when you have a piping bag in hand at 1am and start thinking it would look really great if your theme was just “snow storm”. 

But really, just have fun with it! Also, try to eat some vegetables during the process, because your diet will start to consist of gingerbread scraps and candy canes... at least ours did.