Gingerbread House 2016

Starting a new Christmas holiday tradition in our household; building Gingerbread Houses. Okay, so I’m not much of a baker so we won’t be building them from scratch, though I am sure that would be fun. We also don’t have the room to create and bake the gingerbread itself so we’ll make use of store-bought kits!

My wife went to one of our local big chain grocery stores and picked up a nice little kit as my son, “A”, has expressed a wee bit of interest in building on.  My plan is for him to try and do as much as he can on his own with me being the site supervisor.

Now I’ve done a couple of gingerbread house kits in previous years with our god daughter. When we go to the island to visit our friends, it was a fun thing for her and for me too.  I think we might have done it since she was 2 or 3 years of age, but each year we try and do one together and I think it’s fun.

On to the Gingerbread House construction adventure!

Alright pieces are out of the box and ready for construction adhesive, aka icing. “A” is super excited and I have to try and get him not to eat the gingerbread before he assembles it. Note that the base of the gingerbread house is broken. Nothing a little icing won’t fix!

The only thing I do is spread out the icing. He starts to put the walls up himself.

During the raising of the walls, you’ll notice in the above photo that the front gable of the house has a huge crack in it. While pressing the pieces together a bit of excitement caused it to break apart. Again, icing saves the day! We also followed the instructions for the curing time of the icing. That was hard for a 3.5 year old to do, wait 30 minutes while the icing hardened up enough so that everything would stay together during the more fun parts of decorating.

Slowly decorating with icing and the various candies that came with the kit. This kit is actually the first one I’ve ever used where the candies weren’t rock hard and stale. I guess all the previous ones we’ve bought have been seasoned over the years of purchasing neglect.

After a bit “A” was happy with his decorating and wandered off to play with his wooden train set. You’ll notice the use of green fondant for the door, grass, chimney and one of the gingerbread men; my addition to his masterpiece.

He had a lot of fun building it and I have a lot of fun watching him build it with little help from me. Again, I just placed the icing along the edges of the walls and roof for him. He did the rest.

When he was finished he did want to eat it, though we’ve been trying explain to him he can eat it later but for now just look at it in all of its glory! I wonder if people every do gingerbread house smashes, like they do with 1-year old cake smashes? Oh, perhaps that’s what I can do with “A”, a gingerbread house smash!

Have you built gingerbread houses with your kids? Do you go the easy route and buy a kit like we do, or are you more adventurous and build the gingerbread from scratch etc?