Gingerbread, part 1

Sunday evening, Jill and I thought it would be very holidaze-y to build a gingerbread edifice. We, being who we are, tend to do things a bit over the top.


Naturally, we made the gingerbread from scratch. However, mixing up the dough proved taxing with a hand mixer:


Then I remembered that I have a Kitchen-Aide stand mixer:


I got a kiss for that discovery:


Our resulting dough baby was huge and weighed in at a whopping 7 and a half pounds:



And is clearly bigger than Jill's head:


Rolling out the dough was not easy:


But we managed to make a test piece:


And then we were on a roll:



There aren't any photos to show it, but I did make the various icings used to mortar and ice the walls.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time to finish the edifice that night, so this post must continue another day...