Since I’m sure many of you are (or are soon to be) elbow deep in flour and sprinkles making cookies for friends and Santa, I’m sure our recap of our second annual Gingerbread Barn Building competition comes at the right time! This year, we saw twice as many people come out to build the sweetest barns below the Mason-Dixon and the competition was fierce, y’all. Thankfully, we had the great pleasure of meeting Anna Kirby, who was on hand to document the festivities.
We gathered at The Carolina Inn, where our good friends Heidi and Melissa had set up a hot chocolate and cookie station for us. Readers, friends and vendors came rolling in with their best holiday aprons and then got to work brainstorming the best barn concept.
In addition to the Carolina Inn, we loved partnering with Hammond’s Candies again for this event! They gave us plenty of peppermint, green and red candies, chocolate-filled delectables and giant candy canes to build with. The Southern Weddings ladies may or may not have stolen a piece or two from the candy table at multiple times during the night.
All of our contestants were so creative. The only limitations we put in place were that the barn has to be confined to the plates we gave them and that all of it has to be edible. With those two things in mind, our competitors took off with their ideas! We saw everything from barns with wedding ceremonies inside to plantations with cows and windmills!
We also had a ton of fun showing off V5, especially because some of our guests were vendors who contributed to the issue.
At the end of the night, we had to give the first place prize to the ladies who dreamed up this next creation: a gingerbread plantation with a barn, windmill, cow pasture (with little footprints!) and silo. They even had one of the cows breaking through the fence! Too cute.
We want to give a giant thanks again to our event sponsors, The Carolina Inn, Hammond’s Candies and Anna Kirby and to everyone who came out to celebrate the holidays with us. Spending time with our readers is always one of our favorite things to do (especially when accompanied by sweets and hot chocolate).
Happy Holidays, y’all!
Anna Kirby is a member of our fabulous Blue Ribbon Vendor Directory!
It was a blast, thanks girls!!
Anna, thank you so much for being there! We had a ton of fun.
It was so much fun being part of this event on Ustream! The winning house was a delicious masterpiece lol. Did anyone ended up eating their houses?
Yay! We’re so glad you tuned in, Dee! A lot of people brought theirs home to eat (always my favorite part), but a few people chose to leave theirs behind because they didn’t think the barns would survive the bumpy car ride home!
I love the intense photo of my SIL placing our roof! And of course I like the photo of my candy designs ready to decorate the barn. Everything looks so pretty, and we had a great time building our barn! Thank you for letting us participate!
This was such a fun night, and there were so many creative barns! I love seeing the pictures too! Thanks for having us :)
[…] to join us! For a peek at the masterful creations from last year’s barn builders, look here. As you can see, most attendees choose to work in groups! For readers near and far, we’re so […]