Winterland of Gingerbread

This week was the Winterland of Gingerbread Competition.

Tommy, Emily and Katey all were able to enter their own Gingerbread houses. 

They were all unique and showed their personalities.   We They had so much fun building each of them. 

During the competition we dropped off the houses and then went over to the ice arena to skate.  We came back and they had pizza for us and sticker gingerbread houses for the kids to decorate.  Tyler loved that!  The awards ceremony followed.

Tommy build a log cabin style house. 

It was not overdone and he put a lot of time into the roof and logs.  He knew from the beginning he was going to have a licorice wreath.  His house is built from a kit I ordered from Bountiful Baskets (where I get my produce, and have for over 3 years)

He entered in the middle category, where they judge your house based on design and looks only.  While he did not win a grand prize, he did win best log cabin design. 

For Katey’s house I just purchased a pre-built kit.  It was so nice for her to just be able to decorate it and not have to worry about all the waiting.  Her kit was just purchased from a craft store.  

She loved decorating it with all different kinds of things.  It was neat to see her vision come to life. 

She entered into the lower category.  Houses are not “judged” they all receive awards.  Her award was for the best snowman.  She had used a premade snowman that came with her kit.  She loved it. 

Emily had big dreams her gingerbread house was going to be from scratch and her theme would be A Gingerbread Bakery.  She was going to enter in the very highest category, in which your house is judged on appearance as well as a photo journal and a 100 word essay. 

She drew her design on paper and then cut and formed her house with cardboard and mixed up her gingerbread  then built it.  During the building process it broke. 

Luckily I had a back up kit, which she ended up using.

She changed her theme to be a college football.  Utah Vs. BYU.  In our family we are HUGE Utah fans and her uncles are BYU fans so it is a pretty fun family rivalry.  She still decided to enter into the highest competition. 

 

Paul helped her by using the Dremmel to cut out some windows.  Then she melted Jolly Ranchers in a saucepan and poured them into the windows.  Half of the windows were red and half were blue.  Then she began frosting and decorating it.  When done she wrote her essay and put together a photo journal of her building it.  

She was the only one entered in the category for a while, and she was really hoping some competition would show up.  Finally one house did entered in the same category as her.  During the awards they called the Runner up for her category and right them Emily started going crazy,  “What does that mean?”  After she found out what it meant she was so excited that as soon as they called her name as the winner she went running up and grabbed her trophy so fast it was hard for me to get a picture of her.

Emily had also made a voting box out of Duck Tape so people could vote for their favorite team.  BYU had no votes at all.  I know there were BYU fans there, so they just must have not voted. 

Now her house went onto the state competition and if it wins there then off to nationals.  We had no idea the contest was a progressive one. 

It was a very exciting day for us all.