Our first gingerbread house

This year I have decided to be brave and make a gingerbread house. I followed the recipe in my fvourite baking book, Rachel Allen Bake. The project was split into three stages:baking, assembling, decorating. On Sunday we baked the gingerbread, it looked like quite a lot but we used the rest of the dough for little gingerbread men, trees and hearts. The recipe came with templates (the template for the roof was wrong, but I only noticed that in stage two), you had to cut out the pieces from paper and the from dough, bake them and then give them a trim before cooling. This left us with lovely cut of pieces of gingerbread which had to be tried, we called this quality controle. Monday morning I assembled the house. I used 250g icing sugar and 1egg white, it worked really well. Just before I picked up the big one from school, I got all the decorations out in little jars so that we could get going straight away. Oh the excitement when we got home. We spent an hour decorating, well the little one helped by quality testing the sweets. It was "such fun" (too much Miranda).
I can see that this is going to be a new Christmas tradition. Over the last two weeks, my girls have secretly removed quite a lot of the chocolate buttons and I have caught my husband as well, but I think that is part of the fun of having a gingerbread house.