If At First You Don’t Succeed

I spent all Thanksgiving Day working on ginger builds.

The kit I won at bingo won’t win any awards, but it came out okay.

The big gingerbread build was a total disaster.

I chose Casa Navidená because it reminded me of South Park’s Casa Bonita — the Mexican Restaurant that Cartman was so intent on being included in Kyle’s birthday party there that he misled Butters into thinking the world had ended, had Butters hunkering down in a dump site while he stole Butter’s invitation and got himself inside Casa Bonita.

The build came together, no problem using the egg/powdered sugar frosting glue suggested by JanF (thanks, Jan), but decorating was a fail.

Once the pink icing in the kit was applied, the look was nowhere as vibrant as it appears on the box, not to mention there wasn’t enough icing.

I tried to fix that by adding a drop of red food coloring to the royal icing I’d made for more pink, but still ……… applied to brown gingerbread the color wasn’t pink.

There was enough red in the kit to color the roof, but red on brown gingerbread made the roof look dull, drab.

After trying various ways to save the build, including scraping off the pink, going white, and trying to brighten up the drab roof — all unsuccessful, I tossed the whole thing in the trash.

If at first you don’t succeed …… I headed out this morning for another Casa Navidená kit.

This time I used pink edible food spray, instead of icing.

The gingerbread turned red.

I mixed red food coloring with royal icing, got pink, applied it over the red and it was better, but still not pink.

As the afternoon wore on, and I worked on windows, I mixed the pink in the kit with royal icing, applied several layers of that pink and the color on the house got better.

Once the house was completed, I took the red provided in the kit, mixed it with royal icing, and got a peppermint color — which I liked and, going over the build one last time, got a satisfactory pink.

All those applications of color make the walls look like stucco, but I can live with that.

A few minutes later.