Gingerbread House

I made this at school over 2-3 weeks. We got to learn about how to use different types of icing as a christmassy end-of-year project.
Quite fun to make and difficulty varies depending on how much detail you plan to put into it.

I used a set of house, christmas tree and star cookie cutters for the gingerbread but you could easily use a knife and a paper template from online.
The piles of presents are made of moulding icing or marshmallows with piped royal icing and a cachou.
The columns are made of moulding icing and royal icing piped around it (this was the hardest thing to do). There was going to be a balcony on top but my house had a bit of a slope so it would not fit on symetrically and did not look good.
The wreath on the back(my favourite part ^.^), snow on the roof and on the ground, and the holly on the roof are all piped with royal icing.
The stepping stones are made of moulding icing and the gutter around them is a stringy lolly.
There would have been icicles hanging from all sides of the roof but I ran out of icing and time.
I put a red and green christmas light necklace inside the house which was really cute because you could see it shining out of all the windows.

It is best to have a plan of how you want it to look beforehand so you know where you're going with it. Also, make sure you have a lot of time because everything takes time to dry and set.

I'm pretty proud that I was able to make this (if you couldn't already tell by all the pictures) because, although it may be easy for some people, its a challenge for me xD.

(sorry for the long description, I tried to make it shorter by cutting out a lot that I had to do but its still a long list)