What Happens When Kids Make Their Own Gingerbread House Kits

We had visions of a fabulous gingerbread house. One to rival all the fabulous photos I’ve seen on blogs and flickr pages everywhere. However, I guess I missed the part where constructing those houses were an adult only project. This is what my family’s gingerbread house looked like AFTER grown up intervention. (Before, it collapsed into a pile two gumdrops into decorating and everyone under the age of ten cried. Thank goodness my sister has all those CAD skills. She was able to put the house together again so that it was sturdy enough to keep from collapsing.) Do you see cute icicles hanging off of each perfectly scalloped icing shingle? What about a tidy row of candies lining each perfectly square icing window? 

No, kid decorated gingerbread houses rarely look perfect, but they do look pretty cute. And once the house stopped falling apart, the kids had an absolute blast decorating with the candies they didn’t scarf down at lightning speed. Next year, I think we’re going to have my sister the gingerbread house builder assemble the house an hour or two ahead of time so it has time to get nice and solid before we set the kids loose with candies galore. I also think we’re going to make sure we buy a kit that has premixed icing. It was hard to make the powdered icing mix thick enough to really hold the pieces together.

Now, if we can just get the kids to stop asking, "Can we eat the house? I want to eat the house. Is it time to eat the house?" every ten minutes, we’ll be good to go!

So, I want to know…do your kids create flawless gingerbread wonderlands or do their houses look more like our candy covered shack?

Photo by me