"Hey, Percy," Annabeth said as she invited herself into my cabin. "Guess what I've got?"
"I dunno. The best boyfriend in the world?" I smartly said.
"Mmm" She pretended to think about it. "Besides that. Guess what I have?"
"What?"
"A gingerbread house! It's going to be so fun!" She happily said. I guess it's the whole 'building' and 'architect' obsession she has going on.
We opened the package and dumped out all the pieces. I picked up a piece of paper and it unraveled to the ground accordion style. "Instructions?" I rolled them back up and tore it in two and tossed them over my shoulder. "Don't need 'em." I figure, we can't read them anyway, and besides, the pictures never help. Plus it's more fun to design it from scratch.
"First we need to make the icing. Cut this." She handed me a pair of scissors labeled, "Property of Annabeth Chase" in silver handwriting. I only know this because I've seen her tell off a lot of people not to use her scissors.
Then I dumped out the white powder into a small bowl. "We need water." Annabeth announced.
"I'm on it!" I said getting ready to summon some water. I dripped a little water in at a time, because we didn't really have the measurements, which was kinda in the instructions, which I kinda destroyed.
"Um, Percy?" Annabeth said sounding kind of grossed out and yet a little anxious too, "Were do you get your water from? I mean, somehow you make water magically appear, so where is your source…?"
I thought about that one for a minute. "I really don't know." It just comes some how… Now that I think about it, I'm really curious too.
Annabeth shrugged her shoulders and said, "Okay, let's just keep going."
After we mixed the icing, we attempted to pour it into a plastic piping bag to ice our house. That didn't work out too well. It was really thick and it stuck to the sides as we poured it in creating the worst mess possible.
"Percy! Open the bag wider!"
"I can't it's getting stuck with the icing! Get a spoon to scrape it in cleaner. Annabeth, it's getting on the outside!"
"I can't see, hold it up higher!"
"It's slipping out of my hands!" I said.
And that's basically how trying to make the frosting went. My gods, it's like those really intense cooking shows.
Next we had to build out house. "Ready?" I asked.
"Yep." Annabeth replied and she squeezed the piping bag and iced the left corner of our house. After we attached the front, left and right walls, we thought we were doing pretty good… until everything started to slide down and fall apart.
After an hour we finally had our house. Well standing up at least.
"Okay, let's put the icing on now." Annabeth told me.
Unfortunately I have just about no artistic talent in my body so it wasn't the nicest looking house ever, maybe even the worst.
"This piping bag is so hard to use!" I said getting really frustrated. The hole was cut to big so the icing came out too much. It was really thick and it didn't stick well to the house. It would come out of the bag, curl up, and not stick to the house.
"Gods this is hard! It keeps falling off!" I shouted.
"Just push it down with a toothpick or something." Annabeth suggested.
I tried that. Didn't work. "It's not working. It just gets stuck to the toothpick and everywhere else but the house." I was so aggravated by a small bag of icing. Who would've thought?
After that was settled we moved on to the roof. We wanted ours to look like the box so we attempted to cover the roof with icing. I spread the icing out using a toothpick but it was so hard and taking forever, so I gave up and just used my finger. At this point, I didn't care.
After I finished spreading it out over both sides of the roof, Annabeth said, "You know you could have just used a knife."
All I could do was stare at her and blink. Then I remembered how to speak. "That would've been nice to know twenty minutes ago." I said getting over the frustration.
After that we decorated our house with loads of candy. Sprinkles covered the roof like snow and weird gumball things outlined the door. Windows were to hard to make because the icing was came out too thick and couldn't make small details, so we just pretended windows don't exist. It looked like a three year old did it.
We were almost finished when we found another pack of icing. It was red. We opened it and tried to use it. We tried to draw on the sides of the house making a nice pattern with it but it wouldn't stick! The more we tried to make it stick, the more everything moved and fell apart. The more we tried to fix everything, the more it broke apart. The more it broke apart, the more frustrated we got.
It got to the point where everything fell apart and it looked like a pile of rainbow garbage.
Instead of fixing it, we made some hot chocolate, took a wall from the house each, and sat on my bed near the warm fire. She sat close to me and I wrapped one arm around her, holding my hot chocolate in the other hand. But don't think I forgot about my gingerbread. Annabeth held my piece, feeding me bites in between sips of hot chocolate. Ahhh... We should have given up two hours ago.
Annabeth and I spent the rest of the Christmas Eve night together by the fire, not making that gingerbread house, but still, it was the best gingerbread house ever because if it did turn out great, then we wouldn't we here spending the night together like this.