Creating a How To -- Gingerbread House

Quite a few years ago when my oldest son was a wee babe I needed a little diversion for my creative passions. I found out about a Gingerbread House class at a local little cake decorating store in Seattle (wonder if it's still there??). The lovely woman wanted to raise some money to buy her husband an expensive flannel shirt for Christmas. Well, sign me up! Her little house was somewhat of a departure from the classic gingerbread houses decorated with lots of candy. She called it an version of a Swiss Skiing Chalet. I thought it charming and made a few over the years as gifts. I even appeared on a local morning TV program here in San Francisco (again, many years ago) and showed how to make this little house and created a how-to book.

Recently I've wanted to get back into cake decorating so for Christmas this year I pulled out the old patterns and whipped up a couple. I redid my instruction booklet since 'way back in the day I used an old word processor to type it up and glued drawings with paste, then copied it. I had a lot of fun taking my old instruction drawings and fixing them up in Photoshop--even coloring them.

If you'd like a copy of the instructions and patterns you can click here. Let me know what you think.