How to Decorate a Ginger Bread House

For weeks now my daughter and son have been asking to decorate a gingerbread house after seeing the kit at our local Jewel-Osco and then again at Wal-Mart. The package says it's pre-assembled and decorating it is up to whomever makes the purchase. I decided against it and talked the kids into baking gingerbread men cookies. Two days later my husband walks in from work and has the gingerbread house box under his arm. Looking at him and the kit I asked "how hard can this be to decorate."

The Set Up

My husband pulled the house out of the box and it looked simple enough. The house sat on the cardboard cake tray which was flush with the table. Besides the house; the box also contained an icing tip, icing bag and large package of icing. My husband placed the tip in the end of the icing bag and split the icing package on the side which made it difficult to squeeze into the plastic icing bag and made a mess. It took both of us to get the icing into the bag.

Setting the Plaster of Paris

Now that the house was set up and the icing was in the bag it was my turn to apply the icing to the roof of the house and to decorate it . As soon as I began to apply the frosting to the roof I realized this was going to be harder than I expected. The frosting is very thick and I had to spread it carefully with an icing spatula. Once the roof was covered with a solid layer of icing I began to work on the hanging icicles and edged all the corners with piping. Surprisingly there was enough icing left to create the door, several windows, lattice work on the roof and sides, as well as, dots in between the lattice work and along the truss.

Decorating

The pre-assembled gingerbread house came with three types of decorative candy which were round flat gumdrops, round tall gum drops and small green and red round hard candy. The kids began to add the candy to the designs on the house. For the most part the candy stayed in place well but every now and again the larger pieces would fall off of the house. I noticed this happened in the areas where the icing wasn't as thick.

Time

This project took us nearly two hours to decorate from start to finish. Though the process was a bit tedious my children enjoyed it greatly. The pre-assembled kit was $9 and a hit in our home.