As many of you know, we haven’t gone a year without building and decorating a gingerbread house (see exhibits here, here, here, and here, and we weren’t about to skip it this year. We found something a little different this time, though – a gingerbread turkey kit from Trader Joe’s! We thought it was a fun departure from the usual house, and it also gave us an excuse to exercise our decorating skills a little early, around Thanksgiving time instead of Christmas!
Mio’s definitely at the age now where she can appreciate decorating Easter eggs, so I picked up a dyeing/decorating kit for us and had some creative family fun with it on Saturday night!
It’s that time again… for one of our favorite holiday traditions: building and decorating the gingerbread house! I’m finding that it gets more and fun with every year, as Mio becomes more capable and involved in the decorating process… she placed a lot of the candy herself this year, and gave us some art direction! Mirei was asleep this year (probably for the better, since she probably would have tried to wreck our creation) but maybe next year she can help decorate, too!
In the days since, she’s been asking if she can break off a piece of candy off the house to eat almost daily. Eating it is part of the fun, too! 😉
See past years’ gingerbread houses: 2013 • 2012 • 2011
Yesterday afternoon, we set up and decorated the Christmas tree! It was actually our first time decorating a tree together, because Dan and I never bought a tree while we were in California because we didn’t really have the space for it a lot of times, and were lazy. But tree-trimming is one of my favorite childhood memories of the holidays, so we wanted to make sure we revisited the tradition this year with Mio! 🙂
Earlier in the day, we met up with our friend Stephanie and she inspired us by showing us an awesome stop motion video she created of her pumpkin carving! (Check out more of her creative work at her blog, From Woo to You.) It definitely made an impression because when we returned from lunch and started unpacking the Christmas tree from my parents’ basement, I excitedly suggested to Dan, “Let’s make a stop motion video!” …to which he responded, “You mean a time-lapse, in this case? A stop motion would take forever.” And I said, “Yes! Time-lapse. That.” (Take no offense, videographers, I do indeed know the difference — just used the wrong term in my moment of excited inspiration!) So below is the result. Thank you so much Stephanie for inspiring us! We hope you all will enjoy this fun, short video of our first tree-trimming experience as a family! 😀
Baking is one of my favorite hobbies, and I’ve always been interested in taking a formal cake decorating course. Now that I’m at home with Mio, Dan encouraged me to take advantage of the opportunity to enroll in one and have a couple hours to be creative and immerse myself in something fun every week, while he watches Mio after coming home from work. This is my second week in the four-week beginners course, and I love it! Although there are some things that I already know, there’s a lot of new tips and tricks that I’m learning, and it’s really nice to have that short break every week to myself to do something fun and interesting that’s not baby-related.
Here’s the cake I decorated in class this week…
The teacher encouraged us to frost chocolate cakes, because people usually are intimidated with working with chocolate cakes because the crumbs can be so noticeable when they get into the frosting. She showed us that there’s nothing to be afraid of, and that you can still do a seamless, clean job of frosting without getting crumbs all over the frosting!
As for the taste, Dan really enjoyed it! I thought he’d think it was too sweet (which it was), but he said that it tasted surprisingly light. Good thing, because he will be eating more decorated cakes for the next few weeks… 😛
The only negative thing about the course is that there are so many supplies that the course requires, and the supply costs really add up! I’m not sure if I would have signed up had I know how much it would all cost in the end, but there’s no turning back, and in the end, I’m glad I did sign up. At least the supplies will last a very long time, and will come in handy for all the future cakes I make and decorate! (Eventually, I want to take some of the more advanced courses in fondant and gum paste decorations, too!)
I can’t wait to see what we will be learning next class! Special thanks to the hubby for giving me the nudge to go ahead and take the course! Hopefully we’ll see a big improvement in my cakes from hereon! 😀