Day 4: Gingerbread Church

I didn't actually get a whole lot done today, but I did shingle the roof of the church so it still counts as a work day! =)

To add shingles to the roof, I first had to create the shingles! These shingles will be made of chocolate, and looky here--we've got a whole bag of chocolate chips! (Actually, I used two bags, but only one shows up in this photo.) But I must melt them, and the microwave seemed like the quickest, easiest way to do that.

Once the chocolate had melted, I spread it out on parchment paper on a cookie sheet to create a solid sheet of chocolate. (I created two solid sheets, but this photo only shows one of them.)

And once the chocolate had cooled again to room temperature, I cut it into small squares. I've now got shingles to work with! But I will say this.... they're hard to handle because they melt in your hands in about 1/10th of a second, so I put the cut up shingles in the fridge to chill them before handling them. I'd work with them for about 5 minutes at a time, then cool them again while I worked with the second sheet I had created.

Shingling the roof was rather straight forward. I'd just dip the top of the shingle in frosting (in the bowl), and create rows of the shingles starting from the bottom and working my way up the roof.

First one side, and now almost done with the other side.

And... the roof is done!

The church is actually mostly done now. The roof was the last major feature that needed work. There's still some trim I need to add, but I've run out of frosting so this was a convenient time to stop. I didn't want to make a new batch of frosting until I was ready to use a good chunk of it!

So tomorrow, I'll make some frosting and add the trim--which shouldn't take long--then get to work on the landscaping!