I'm taking a foods and nutrition class and the girls that share my kitchen and I have a little battle going on with the kitchen next to us. We couldn't decide which group had successfully pulled off the most recipes over the course of the semester, so we decided that our final "battle" would be the last food we had to make, which happened to be a gingerbread house . As it is our last dish we make in the class, our teacher turns it into a whole big competition (if we were on Food Network like I was pretending to be, I would call this "Battle Gingerbread" and it would be so awesome). All of her classes put out their finished gingerbread houses and teachers from all over the school come in and vote for who's is best, and the winning kitchen group gets prize money and extra credit for their efforts.
Anyways, we found out through extreme stealth (just kidding, we came right out and asked them) what our rival kitchen was doing for their gingerbread house: a log cabin made of pretzels with a frosting lake, Swedish Fish, and fisherman gingerbread men.
A log cabin? How unoriginal could they get ? Actually, it was almost exactly what we were planning on doing- right down to the Swedish Fish in the lake.
So we got down to business and strategized (aka went straight to Pinterest and proceeded from there). Boom. Brilliant idea: a beach gingerbread house. What, what?!
The next step was to hit the bulk candy section of Winco and assemble our masterpiece. However, I'll spare you the tales of hours and hours of construction and skip right ahead to the pictures!
I only had my sugar-coated iPhone with me (results of looking at Pinterest ideas right next to the frosting bowl that I kept sneaking spoonfuls out of), so the pictures aren't that great, but I think you can still tell how adorable and creative our gingerbread house was (though it's much nicer in person).
I mean, just look at the roof made of Triscuit crackers (that literally took me an hour to "shingle" by the way), the umbrella made of a meringue cookie and a pretzel stick, the pineapples made of lemon sours and green licorice, the palm trees created from these really gross apricot log things and green Laffy Taffy, and the Teddy Grahams in their peach ring floaties and sporting various colors of flower shaped sprinkles as bikinis.
IT'S SO FREAKING CUTE AND I AM SO PROUD OF MY KITCHEN.
In this picture, you can see some of the other details that simply made our gingerbread house, like the Pez/sprinkle flip-flops by the door, the perfectly piped grass decorated with flower sprinkles, and the Brookside Dark Chocolate covered Acai things as coconuts.
And don't you love our mini Swedish Fish, the floating Teddy Grahams, the surfing one, and the gummy sharks in the water?
Though my whole group had originally wanted to create a wintery, log cabin gingerbread house, I think it worked out just fine. Besides, our enemy kitchen did a really good job and it would have been terrible to have two almost identical houses being judged next to each other.
I'm so happy I got to get to know the other four girls in my kitchen this semester and I deeply apologize for the terrible picture of 4/5 of us, but I couldn't resist sharing it.
After documenting the moment for Instagram, we gifted our first place gingerbread house to our ASL teacher since we all have and love her. That and we didn't want to try to figure out how to get it home and what to do with it.