It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

The Thanksgiving leftovers are all put away, and the Christmas tree is up. I'm feeling the Christmas spirit, so I wanted to do something with my kids to spread the Christmas cheer. I have never made a gingerbread house before, but I always wanted to give it a try. I'm not one to buy pre-packaged kits, I wanted to do something original. So, I gathered my supplies while at the grocery store today. Here's what you will need to do this project:

- Ginger snap cookies (for the roof)

- Graham crackers (for the base of the roof)

- Wafer cookies (for the frame of the house)

- Assorted cookies (to decorate the house)

- Ginger bread man cookies (because what's a 

cookie house without a gingerbread family to live in it)

- Butter cream icing or royal icing to glue it all together

First, round up your little helpers, and lay two graham crackers on your cake plate. Outline them with icing as a guide for cookie placement when you start building your house.

Now, remove the graham crackers and start laying the foundation. The wafer cookies are great for building the walls. The thickness of the wafer makes it easy to stand them up with a little icing to glue them in place.

Lay the wafers for the front of the house down lengthwise, as shown here. And, stand the wafers for the sides up vertically. If you notice on the back, we laid the top horizontal wafer down flat, so that it would be level with the vertical walls. 

I know it looks ugly now, and I had that horrified moment of disappointment at this point. But, I was determined to finish our project.

So, we finished building the walls, my kids ate a couple icing dipped wafers, and we began laying the roof.

For the roof, use a little icing to stick two graham crackers flat on the top of the house. And, you will need something to give height to the top of the roof. So, use icing to stack a few wafer cookies to the center, like this:

Now, you can use icing to attach two more graham crackers to the sides of the roof at an angle. Once the angled sides are in place, you can start icing ginger snaps onto the roof. 

If you want, you can go ahead and stick a decorative cookie to each side of the house as "windows", and a graham cracker to the front of the house to make a door, like I did here.

I wasn't sure what to do about the big, hideous gap showing on the front and back "attics" of the house, so I took a graham cracker, broken in half, and cut angles at the top. I used all the pieces and iced them into place. 

 Now that the foundation of the house and roof is built, you can start the really fun part, decorating! 

You can do this any way you want, but me and my two little cookie-filled ladies decorated by spreading a bit of icing around on the cake board. Then we sprinkled powdered sugar around on the top of the house, and the girls tossed cupcake sprinkles on top of that also.

We used icing to stand gingerbread men all around the sides of the house. and a little more icing to stand decorative cookies all around the "yard" of the house. A few chocolate chips made a nice, little walkway to the front door, and our cookie house was complete. Hmm..or maybe it was complete, I may go back and put a candy cane or two up...that is, if the kids don't eat the house first! Have fun with this project, and let me know how yours turns out!