Gingerbread House Building Contest 


The Perfect Girl's Night to Celebrate my Birthday 

I think our blog readership knows me well enough to know that an evening of forcing my girlfriends to eat candy and do crafts with me is pretty much my perfect birthday wish. Luckily, it's an evening that interested a bunch of them as well! Last night, 17 women formed 6 teams to compete, and while some were more focused on houses and others were more focused on eating the decor/drinking yummy spiked cider, the overall event was an undeniable success.

After initial noshing and catching up, I explained my (made up) rules to my friends, many of whom had brought (and were already wearing) their own aprons! Don't I have the best girlfriends? The rules were not complex -- really the only requirement was that everything had to be edible.



Teams and ideas formed, and soon everyone was hard at work:



The quickest workers/those whose projects were hit with Katrina-level natural disasters were happy to hang out until the more hardcore competitors finished their masterpieces:



Finally, it was time to judge!

Winner: The Gingerbread Zoo (Colleen, Maryola, Abby)

It's hard to see, but the yard has tigers (smoking bubblegum cigarettes?), zebras, snowmen walking dogs, a pool with fish and sharks... the works.

This is the first runner up, perhaps not voted in as winner due to it's unfair advantage (architect on team with 2 crazy overachievers -- Kelly, Kate & VeeDub).


Along with the beautiful modernist design and great landscaping, the best part had to be the extremely lifelike pond, made from athlete's goo I think?

For the Gingerbread traditionalists, this next one was a major favorite -- by Dani, MacKenzie and Malaise:


The Necco Wafer shingles were a nice touch, but the best parts were the tiny details -- mailbox, newspaper on the front walk... precious.

The team of nurses (Jen, Emma) built our village a much-needed gingerbread hospital, complete with marshmallow ambulance and injured person on his way in -- very impressive.



My team (with Heathery & Wendy), knowing we couldn't compete with all of the crazy houses, went more for the gingerbread sheet cake look, mixing all of my favorite non-Jewish traditions together to create the Christmas Bunny. Get a load of the dyed coconut for the ears...



Finally, a team that I had high hopes for (Amelia, Cori & Rebecca) due to Amelia's vast competitive food crafts experience, started off as a beautiful christmas present... until all hell broke loose. This was their final entry:



After judging and avoiding clean-up, I opened some very thoughtful birthday presents. Colleen was the only one to present me with jewelry, and it was delicious. Here's a shot of me wearing it, before it dyed my neck multi-colored.



Finally, a handful of women stayed to hang out for a while and then to help me clean up a practically insurmountable mess -- the BEST BIRTHDAY GIFT EVER. There's a little left to do, but I have high hopes that Ella will take care of it before I come home this evening.

Thanks to everyone who called (sorry if I didn't answer, now you see my hands were too full of icing to pick up the phone) and wrote and came over to help me celebrate my 29th birthday!
 

Posted: Wed - December 14, 2005 at 10:21 AM          

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