Mini Gingerbread Houses

For this year's Christmas cookie experiment, I decided to make mini gingerbread houses.  I wanted the gingerbread to actually taste good, so I tried two different recipes that promised to result in gingerbread that was both tasty and strong enough to make a house.  The winner was this recipe from the New York Times.  I made some paper templates and used them to create the gingerbread house parts:

If I do this again, I'm investing in some cookie cutters.  This part was not fun.  

I used royal icing to hold my houses together.

And then it was time to decorate! 

I'm not going to lie.  It took me about 5.5 hours to decorate all these little houses.  Steve even decided to help out with a few!

And in the end, it was all worth it because they look great AND they taste great!

Thanks for stopping by!