Every year my Aunt comes over and the girls and I attempt to make a gingerbread house – nothing fancy, store bought gingerbread kit with about 10 extra pounds of candy to go on it.
But, the girls don’t like gingerbread, and I don’t like stale cookies, so after picking the candy off of the roof, we usually throw the house out… which seems like such a waste (of food and money).
This year I decided we were going to go smaller – something along these lines:
Fantastic right? A small chocolate bar house covered with candy – this I know I the girls will eat.
Image from Nestle – no backlink available
I went out and stocked up on my Kit Kat bars (buy them at the Dollar store – they are only about $0.70 each versus $1.20 at the grocery store),
and my 10lbs of candy; (don’t discriminate – tree frogs celebrate Christmas too you know)
and I found this pre-made royal icing at the bulk store for $1.79 – perfect!
I thought the kids might get frustrated trying to put their houses together, so I attempted to have the framework done before they got home from school. This is the roof – I set it at a 90 degree angle and then put it in the fridge for a half hour hoping to get it to harden.
I put two small skewers into the sides of the Kit Kat houses so that the roof could rest on them while the icing hardened. Again, I put it in the fridge for a half hour.
It was a candy frenzy! We all went by the mantra “two for me, one for the house…”. I can’t speak to the hygiene of any of these houses; there was a lot of taste-testing, finger-licking and even floor-dropping once or twice – but what’s a few germs between friends right?
As the rooves started getting heavier and the chocolate warmed up under hot little hands, they started to slide, and slip and eventually fall off altogether – which made my chocolate bar house look a bit more like a chocolate bar prison. (Oh yeah, I totally licked the icing off the side – it wasn’t just the kids that were corrupt.)
Tyler’s became a cabin, complete with a Kit Kat deck out front and a tree frog as a guard dog. Hey, weren’t there 4 tree frog guards at one point?
Jaden was smart and tucked some jolly ranchers under the roof to help keep it up. I love her pretzel chimney and that red jube jube is Santa, complete with a chocolate hat and a long (drool-like) beard.
Chloe decided to forego putting too many candies on her house and instead decided to focus on eating as much as possible.
Madison’s roof collapsed as well, but it became a rainbow hut for Santa’s elves. The North Pole is covered in white snow – the elves need a little colour in their lives.
Where did we go wrong?
Nowhere – the kids and I had a great time eating and creating and using our imaginations to make the best of our houses. No one threw up – which I consider a huge win given the amount of candy they ate, and we created a fun memory together…. something I hope they’ll want to do again next year.
Having said that, if you do want yours to look a little more like the Nestle or BHG houses, I’m going to suggest using melted chocolate instead of royal icing – there might be too much oil in the chocolate for the icing to adhere and harden properly but be careful, melted chocolate can burn little hands.
I’m off to eat at least one house before the kids get home from school – Have a great one!
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Aw, his was an extremely nice post. Spending some tine and acttual effort to producee a good article… but whnat can I say… I
procrastinate a lot and don’t seem too get nearl anything done.