Who would have thought building a pre-packaged gingerbread would be a royal pain to build. We picked up the kit last year and ran out of time to build it with the kids so we set it aside for this year. Given my background and my last name I figured piece of cake…
My first mistake was trying to follow the direction and assembling the little cardboard house molds, which made it impossible to attach the gingerbread to itself. Once I threw those cardboard molds away and had the boss thicken the royal icing mix we were in business and ready to build. I only broke one gable end in the process, but I blame it on lack of plans and misshapen pieces.
Fortunately, I didn’t have a problem putting the icing to it. If Wen had told me earlier that there was no chance of eating this due to its age I would have gone out to the garage and got a tube of liquid nails, but by then we were committed to the Royal Icing. If you look closely in one of the windows you just may be able to see some of the structural peppermint sticks that I needed to add inside the structure to reinforce the walls from collapsing. Any professional architect or engineer would be proud!
One note to parents of young children that are helping you assemble the gingerbread house – monitor their candy intake! I think my 3 year old ate almost a whole bag of Sour Patch kids while I was re-engineering this confection. Naturally he was wound for the rest of the afternoon. Who knew kids can get that loud!