My New and Improved Christmas Village, Not So New and Improved Gingerbread House

For Christmas DH got me a couple of new pieces for my Dept. 56 New England Village, and I finally had a chance to make a new layout with the add'l pieces, and although you can buy "roads", I made my own for now.  It's a little hokey, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out.  (You can see how it looked before if you scroll down in this post.)  Here's a view of the new layout:

 

  

Here's a closeup view of my "Hokey Street":

  

And usually every year I buy one of those pre-baked gingerbread house kits and DD and I put it together.  I forget which brand I normally get (I would know the box if I saw it), but this year I was at BJ's Wholesale Club and they had a kit that looked really good - it even came with it's own tray with "wells" for the walls of the house so you don't have to brace the whole thing with soup cans, and it came with a ton of good candy.  Too bad the icing it came with was so dry and thick it took superhuman strength to squeeze it through the bag!  In fact, the kit came with a pastry bag and icing tip but it was impossible to use it - I actually nearly had a blow out in the bag from trying to squeeze it - good grief, I didn't expect to have to put on my goggles and safety equipment for a gingerbread house!  Ended up taking all the icing out and putting it in a ziploc, and then of course I had to cut a giant hole in the tip of the bag just to be able to get the icing out without having to call up the World's Strongest Man (have you ever watched that competition show on tv? I love that show.).  So I had to try to ice and decorate it with big, huge dry strings of icing.  Not exactly one of my fondest Christmas memories from this year.  However, despite the crappiness of this stupid kit, we persevered and here it is...  (Once the candy started going on, that helped distract from the culinary-school-dropout icing job.)

(Incidentally, I realize I could have attempted to thin the icing with a little milk or water, but I was really worried that it might not incorporate properly and I might ruin the icing completely.)  I think we were supposed to write our own last name over the door, but in the picture on the box it said, "Kringle" and that's what DD wanted to write, so just in case you were rubbing your hands with glee, ready to try to hunt down "Carole Kringle" and toilet paper my house, I'll save you the time, that's not our last name.

Only two more days of eating everything in sight until I join Weight Watchers!

The end.