Home Builders and Home Wreckers

As we did last year, this year we decided to make a gingerbread house as a family. Except this time our gingerbread house was actually a gingerbread house and not a gingerbread train.  The first phase of the project was the decorating.  The house itself came already assembled, which was nice.  It included the candy, the icing, and the fondant.  I started off decorating it like a gingerbread house, but I realized one of the main purposes is for the kids to be able to decorate it, so I changed my strategy to just create as much icing surface area as possible to give plenty of places to stick on the candy.  It went fairly well, but the small candy balls were hard to handle, and the dogs were the beneficiaries.

Here is the finished version of the house.  I didn't have a great place to use the red and green fondant, so I put some stripes on the roof and made a small chimney and a green door.  But I just slapped the green on the front of it, as everyone was anxious for phase 2 of the project.

We then wasted no time in beginning the destruction of the house we just built.  One plan could have been to break it into small pieces and then eat the pieces, but I decided a better plan was for all of us to just dig in and bite chunks off of it.  Hannah was too small to do this, and Meghan seemed to think this wasn't the best approach, so they each ate their portions in the more traditional manner.  It was another fun time, and I look forward to next year when Hannah can join in the decorating process.