The Gingerbread Village...

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We used both the Williams Sonoma Train pan and their Vintage Cars pan for this. It was a total experiment this year, I baked the train using a spice cake mix, and then I baked the cars using a vanilla cake mix. We all agreed that the spice cake gave the train a richer, brown color that worked better with the candies than the vanilla cars.

It was a great experience, we all enjoyed it, but ESPECIALLY Tonia. She had an absolute blast doing this, and as you can see from the expression on her face, she loved how it turned out.

This will definitely be an annual event for us, it will be fun to see what we come up with next year.

A few handy dandy tips if any of you decide to try it...

I had the gingerbread structures prebaked, that way all the family had to do was decorate, which of course, was the fun part. I went to Mr. Bulky in the mall and bought the candy. You can just buy what you need there, instead of having to buy entire bags of candy, and they had a great selection. Then I went to Walgreens and bought the little 39 cent ice cream sundae cups (which I had some of anyway, I love those little plastic cups, they are great for a lot of things) to put the candies in, no mess that way...Also, the prebaked train got stale, so it was really firm and easy to work with. I baked the vintage cars the morning we decorated it, and they were soft and much harder to work with. For the frosting, I bought cans of Wilton icing at Wally World, red, white, green and yellow, and it was really easy to attach the candies using this icing. For the basic structure, I used super glue, that was much easier than trying to using frosting.

Hubby painted the locomotive black, and the caboose red, that was a nice touch. I think in the future, we might also paint some of the cars. If you try and put icing on the entire car, it just looks globby, the paint works much better.

Obviously, we aren't eating this!!!

I think that if you attempted to do this whole project in one evening, it might get overwhelming, but this worked out really well. It's still time consuming, but oh so much fun!!! Christmas carols, s'mores, and later in the evening a little vino, and we had a rockin' good time....

~ jan