Gingerbread Stadium

We wanted to make a unique gingerbread house today. As we thought about ideas, we decided that the boys' favorite things involve sports, so why not make a stadium. 

We made the gingerbread dough first (I got a recipe from simplyrecipes.com): 

Ingredients: 

6 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

4 teaspoons ginger

4 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon allspice

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 sticks butter (softened)

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

2 eggs

1 cup molasses

1 Tablespoon water

Whisk the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Set aside. 

Using a mixer, beat the brown sugar and butter together until fluffy. Beat in the eggs, molasses, and water. 

Add half of the flour mixture to the molasses mixture. Beat until well combined. 

Add the remaining flour mixture and knead with your hands or the dough hook of a mixer. Wrap dough with plastic wrap and let sit in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Roll out the dough to the size you need for your stadium. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured piece of wax paper. I rolled two pieces 4 inches wide by about 14 inches long for the long sides of the stadium. The short sides were 4x8 and the field was 3x11. (Or close to that.) I made goal posts out of scrap dough. It was a lot easier to have the entire goal post constructed, as opposed to constructing the post after they were baked. I also did some mini gingerbread men and some mini footballs with the scrap dough.  Bake the dough for 8-11 minutes on a greased cookie sheet, or until it starts to brown. Let cool before constructing. 

For the icing, I mixed two egg whites with 1 1/3 cup powdered sugar. Whisk that until it is smooth. Then add another 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar. Beat with a mixer on high speed until you get the consistency you want. You may need to add a little more powdered sugar. 

I decorated the field before placing it insde the stadium.

 I glued the pieces of the stadium together with the frosting and put it on a cookie sheet pan covered with tin foil. Make sure you put frosting on the bottom of the walls so they attach to the tin foil for extra support. 

I used a grass tip and colored some of the white frosting green for the field. Then, I colored a little frosting blue and drew on a lion and colored the end zones. I added white accents with a line decorating tip. I cut out little slots on the end to stick the field goal posts. 

We added the footballs and gingerbread players to the field. Then we placed the field inside the stadium. 

I was going to attach marshmallows to the sides of the stadium to resemble people, but it didn't look good, so I settled for the frosting dots the marshmallows made on the walls. Then I attached the goal posts with frosting.