The First Gingerbread House

No, this is not the story of the invention of the gingerbread house (though I bet that would be an interesting tale). This is the story of L's first gingerbread house. Being lazy Americans, we used kit with prefab parts, much like those halves of houses trucks carry along highways. Construction was challenging enough without starting from scratch!

The kit had German and English instructions!

When we saw the kit in the store, we knew L would love it because building a gingerbread house combines her two main interests--art and frosting. Although I don't think she'd ever seen a gingerbread house before, she was eager to start as soon as she saw the box.

At first, we had to lay out all the components to make sure we weren't missing anything. The kit contained all the walls, roof, etc, plus candy for decorations and even little people to populate the house.

Decorations, check!

Walls and roof, check!

The kit included a pastry bag (but no tips) and icing sugar. We added egg white and lemon juice to mix up the frosting. L was very good about not eating any of the components while we built the house, but did start picking away decorations after the house was finished (and as soon as my back was turned).

The kit had a nice "tab A into slot B" system where you fitted the walls into the slots in the floor. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very tight fit, but we made do by propping up the walls with various baking pans while the "mortar" dried.

Bracing the back side is serious business

Without any pastry tips we couldn't achieve all the decorations as shown on the box, but I was pleased by how close we came. L especially enjoyed dusting the powdered sugar "snow" over everything once we were done. 

Then it was complete.

Finished product

We have not eaten it yet, though L is eager to try out that part of the project.