If you have been following my 2nd channel on YouTube (if not then you can check it out here) then you will know that I have been making my first ever gingerbread house! Along the journey a couple things went wrong and here I can tell you what went wrong and how to fix it if it ever happens to you.

Every year my family has this competition with the whole family which is all across the world. My family has never taken part by making the house, only sitting back and watching the creativity take place. But this year, I thought it was time we stop slacking and start baking! 

I take consumer studies as a school subject (which for those of you who don't know, it's like home economics. You learn how to cook and sew and all about fashion and nutrition.) This is the reason why I was put in charge of the whole gingerbread house operation. I was really excited about it because I know quite a bit about icing and decorating because I took a course in it. 

So the first thing we did was find a recipe which worked. We found a good recipe and we tried it out a couple of weeks ago. We made gingerbread bears and didn't spend much time on actually icing them but rather testing to see how the actual gingerbread would turn out. The biscuits can out perfectly and we enjoyed 'naming' them. 

So then it was time to start planing how exactly the house was going to look and to find a template to cut the piece out. This went well as we were all organized and we planned to bake the house the week before christmas because our competition was over on Christmas day. Thinking back, this may have not been the brightest idea for our first gingerbread house...

Our first problem came when our we had the issue of load shedding. We had to plan when exactly to make them in order to avoid them being in the oven when the electricity goes off. We did plan it correctly but then somehow the times changed and that meant that we had to take them out of the fridge earlier than they were supposed to in order to have them cooked before the electricity cut off. Big mistake.

This meant that the gingerbread was not ready to be put in the oven which had a domino affect. The gingerbread did not cook properly. Our oven itself is quite old which often results in our cookies burning because the bottom heats up more than the top which means the cookies have to stay in or they will still be raw inside but this means the bottom goes black. We didn't want to risk the gingerbread burning and figured they will harden outside the oven. And so we took them out... another big mistake.

We waited for them to harden but they never did. We did this on Thursday which meant we had exactly 1 week before the due date and we had wasted the whole day to no avail. Thankfully we had a back up plan. 

We went to the shops and bought a kit which we did check if it was ok to do with "Judge Gran" which was approved. This kit was brilliant. It had all the piece already made including sweets, icing and instructions. We ended up not using the icing because we already made our own and we only used a few sweets because we had already bought. 

We were paranoid that with our luck, the house was going to collapse or something so we stuck the walls together and left it for a day to harden, then we stuck the roof together the next day and let it harden for another day. Finally on Sunday, it was the day for decorating. 

And what do you know? Another problem. Because of where we live, the house had become very soft and moist. To solve this problem, we stuck it in the sun for a little while, just to dry it out a little bit. Later on during the day, we were able to decorate. Thankfully nothing went wrong while decorating and overall the house turned out beautiful. :) 

My tips to you is that make sure you test the recipe out and make sure you do the same thing to make sure you get success. Also don't keep the house in a place which is moist or too cold because your house will become way to soft. Also if, in my case for example, you have a time limit, make sure to not procrastinate ad start early enough incase you have a problem like me. And if all else fails, go to your local super market and buy and gingerbread house making kit. ;)

If you're interested in seeing the house progress then here are some pictures or you can check out my vloging channel here

Love you all