Gingerbread Decorating: Mini Gingerbread Houses

My friends and I had a little mini-gingerbread-house-making party last week using the methods and templates described in this adorable post from Megan at notmartha! Instead of choosing to perch ours on cups, though, we just decided to make a mini-village :)

One of my friends made the cookie dough in advance, and another worked on cutting out the shapes seen here.

Baked! This batch wasn't terribly puffy at all, but the cookies certainly seemed to rise more as the dough warmed up, as mentioned in the post that inspired us.

Then it was time to start building the houses!

House assembling is a nerve-wracking process, even if the pieces are just tiny gingerbread cookies.

One of my friends decided to make a tiny (!!!) gingerbread snowman with sprinkle features.

This was the house I ended up decorating, along with a tiny Christmas tree! (I am perhaps unduly proud of that tree.)

Royal icing-piped shingles! I had hoped to do more of the icicle effect, but it was challenging to get the icing to look how I wanted on such a small scale.

We were very proud of our village :)

And we later decided to "paint" the foil with the excess royal icing for a hasty snow effect.

I also used some lovely cookie cutters to make chocolate-dipped snowflake cookies out of the leftover gingerbread, and I'll make a quick post about those in a few days. But until then, happy new year!