18 Christmas Cakes & A Gingerbread House

Well it has been a marathon couple of weeks in my kitchen. I have been baking Christmas cakes for sale as I blogged about earlier. I finished decorating the last of my cakes today and it was such a relief. I am really pleased with how it all went as I ended up with orders for 18 cakes. So far the response to the cakes has been extremely positive. The decorating went well, helped along by my awesome mum. Between the two of us we decorated 16 of the cakes in 2 hours last week. The other two cakes were still baking, and I decorated them this afternoon.

Some of the cakes ready for decoration. We cut out boards to fit under each of them.

The first six cakes decorated. My mum brought a selection of ornaments to put on top of the cakes.

All finished and ready to be wrapped in cellophane.

In the midst of baking and decorating Christmas cakes I have also been baking decorated Christmas cookies, gingerbread Christmas ornaments and now today, a Gingerbread House.

My kids were given a kit of cutters to make a Gingerbread House, so we decided to use it before Christmas so that they could show their uncle on Christmas Day (he is the one who gave them the kit). I love making gingerbread and have a great recipe from my mum. We make it every year, cutting out Christmas shapes and then once they are baked, we hang them on our Christmas tree. My kids love spending the week before Christmas eating them, and it makes the house smell delicious.  So this year I have made gingerbread twice, once with my neighbour and her two kids, and now again today to make a Gingerbread House. Once the house was cut out and baked we started taking photos and putting it all together.

I used a recipe for the royal icing that I found over at Sweetopia. The only thing I found was that my egg whites were very fresh and I think that affected the consistency of the icing. I needed to use almost twice the amount of icing sugar to get it right.

Once I did get the right consistency I was about to start raising the walls and putting the roof on.

Raising the walls.

First side of the roof is going on.

I did decorative trim along the joins to make it prettier.

 Because the icing is so thick I did all the assembly work and then my kids were able to start decorating.

I have to say that I am really happy with the job they did. They worked really hard, and only ate a few of the lollies as they were going along. Most of them ended up on the house!