Every year the kids and I do some sort of holiday baking. One thing we have never tried is a Gingerbread House. And. Well. We didn’t make one this year either. However, we DID make a Gingerbread Train to take to the Train Club party at my parent’s house last night.

If you’d like to try this, you can find the recipe and patterns at the Family Fun website.

Instead of going to the Women’s Ministry Christmas Party at our church, I stayed home and helped the kids make the gingerbread dough. It has to be refrigerated overnight which meant we HAD to make it Monday night if we wanted it to be ready for cutting out on Tuesday morning. Emily thanked me several times for staying home with them to make the dough instead of going to the Women’s party. I guess there will be many years ahead for such mom nights after the kids are grown. Any of you with kids 17 or older know that the time will come sooner than you think.
Josh *almost* had a mishap while refilling the flour container!

The dough is finished and ready to be refrigerated. The kids are exhausted (so am I, but mom always has more work to do) and went to bed. I was up until very late getting the house picked up and ready for tomorrow.
As soon as the kids got up we started on rolling out, cutting, and baking the pieces. They have to sit for 2 hours before assembling and the entire train has to be done by 6:00 Tuesday night so it’ll be a LONG DAY!We gave Nathan his own ball of dough. He was content to leave us to our work now that he had something to do.

I’m certain he dirtied every utensil in the drawer including this apple slicer which made a cute design.

After the cutouts were cooled, Emily and I started on the frosting. Josh started on the board and track.
We all had a hand in making each piece. The kids had to continue some of the finishing touches while I took time out for a few piano lessons.

Here is the engine although the better picture is the first one shown above.

The coal car is attached to the engine:

The log trailer is attached to the coal car:

The caboose is the final piece:

It even has a FRED (flashing rear end device) which you can see if you look REALLY close. It’s the red M&M at the very bottom.
Here’s the whole train:

There is one sad note to this holiday baking day and that is Amanda received a phone call at 7:50 Tuesday morning. It was WAY TOO EARLY for any of her friends to be calling so I knew it had to be her office calling. It was. One of the gals is out on maternity leave which leaves only Amanda and the other assistant who works full time plus a temporary who was hired to cover the maternity leave. The full time assistant called in sick and the temporary couldn’t find a babysitter which left Amanda as the ONLY assistant that day – if she could come in. The secretary offered to come and help her with her homework tonight (LOL) and said they would “owe her big.” (LOL)! She’s very diligent about getting her work done and our Dec school schedule is a bit slower than other months so she said she would go in and work. However, that meant she wasn’t here to participate in any of the decorating with us….. sigh…. However, she was able to stop and my parents and get their YUKON on her way home so we could transport the train to their house in it since their backseats are out and our backend is completely filled with “stuff.” Here Tim and the kids are taking the finished Gingerbread Train to the car.

I think the train club really enjoyed the gingerbread train decoration! My mom decided it was too pretty to eat so it’s now on display at her house… that works since she has a TRAIN ROOM with plenty of room for such a thing and I don’t! It was a LOT of fun, but I think we’ll have to do a little more holiday baking a little closer to Christmas. I’ve already had several requests for cheesecakes again this year. We’ll see (LOL). I usually like to do something different every year, but I suppose I could be convinced to make some more cheesecakes this year now that we’ve gotten our “new project” out of the way for this year!