By Popular Demand

Here are a couple of views of our Gingerbread House 2008. If you look closely, you'll see that our gingerbread house is not a gingerbread house, but is a gingerbread cruise ship. We decided to go with the cruise ship theme because we are going to take an Alaskan cruise in August with the family...all 33 of us. I'm not sure if you can tell, but the ship is the Diamond Princess, which is the ship on which we're booked. The kids have some very humorous and creative touches: the little gingerbread man on the inner-tube behind the ship, the gingerbread man hanging off the balcony, and a little gingerbread man at the bow of the ship, a la "Titanic." Speaking of the Titanic, there's a sunken ship of the same name under the candy water. The word "Titanic" is spelled out in licorice. On land, there is a little gingerbread man mushing with a candy-cane dog sled, (dogs portrayed by gummy bears.) David is hoping that we take the optional dog sled tour. There's a swimming pool on top of the ship with a diving board and a gingerbread man swimming in the pool. We're afraid it might be a little cold to swim up in Alaska, but one never knows. If you look closely at the candy water, you can see lots of fish, and one whale breaching in the second view. The whale's water spout is made out of a blue Twizzler.

We've gotten lots of questions about the "water." It was made out of sugar, corn syrup and food coloring. You have to boil it at a certain temperature for about 10 minutes before you pour it. It hardens to hard-candy consistency.

Giving proper credit where it is due, my role in this creation was limited to making the royal icing, buying ingredients for the dough, and purchasing some of the candy. Paul and the kids did all the construction and decoration, which took a total of four days. The finishing touches were made at about 2:00 in the morning before our family progressive dinner. We wanted all the family members going on the cruise to see the gingerbread ship at our holiday progressive dinner. It was a very big success!