Gingerbread Houses and Grandkids

My son called me up last week to tell me that the grandkids were complaining about missing out on building Gingerbread Houses at Grandma's house. We have done houses together most if not every year but I somehow missed that it was a tradition for the kids.

We had the kids over this past Sunday and their Mommy and Daddy got a much needed chance to go on a date to a movie. Making gingerbread houses seemed like an appropriate  way so spend Ukrainian Christmas.

We had a nice dinner and then quickly cleared the table so that we had lots of rooms for gingerbread houses, 4 kids and extra candies! Grandpa had gone to the store and purchased a wide assortment of extras but there was one very special bag with assorted jujubes. We had raspberries, coke bottles and most special of all we had Christmas Sharks.

When my kids were little I used to make the dough and chill it, make sticky royal icing and make cardboard trial versions to use as patterns. It was time consuming and took days really but it was worth the effort. I even made gingerbread houses and gingerbread men with children at my kids schools. It was lots of fun but due to time and minimal kitchen resources we did graham cracker houses based on milk cartons. When we did Gingerbread men with older kids I was amazed how a cookie cutter man and lady suddenly could be dogs, aliens with multiple limbs and funny head shapes and some cookies would be holding hands as BBF.

A generation later the supermarkets have a good selection of ready made kids. Premade gingerbread, bags of icing and a nice start to the candy decorations. The grandkids are aged 11 to 2 so it is just easier to set everyone up and go for it. The house above is what the 7 year old boy did. The shark is edging around the corner to surprise the gummy bear. lol

The older kids were much more detail orientated this year for example look at all the icicles. Next year I want to try and get the two older ones over to make cookies from scratch and plan the style of house they want to build. They would love doing that. Then we could add the other two kids the following day and still all decorate the houses together.

The almost 3 year old was so funny. Her shark tried to eat me and swam all over the plate and the table and jumped over the houses. She also had a moment when she started to cry because of her mucky hands but then aunty told her to stop fussing and just lick them. Well my goodness! Icing is edible, the candy was edible but not sure she figured out the gingerbread was yummy but she kept licking it. It is so funny to be almost 3.

We had a special visit from Batman,  to check out the Gingerbread. He approved!