In the grand tradition first established on College Avenue, we invited the neighbourhood kids over to decorate a gingerbread house. Spoiler alert: I apologize in advance for the fact that I didn't take any photos of the kids. I was having a "be in the moment" moment, and decided that recording everything for the archives wasn't the most important thing. Of course it should have been my top priority! For note-keeping purposes, present were Justin, Dylan, Anne, Guillaume, Xavier, and Eloise (plus my two urchins).
Anyhoo, as more people started accepting my invitation I began to get nervous that the house would flop.
I've only made one before, and that went fine, but anyone who has built a gingerbread house (and a few people who have built real houses, I suppose) can attest, the roof can just slide right off at an inopportune moment.
The upshot is that I baked the house the night before and there were no mishaps. No misshapes, either.
Bulk Miniwheat boxes are the perfect template material, by the way.
Pre-baked goodness
The half Christmas trees get glued to the backs of the whole Christmas trees so they stand up in the yard. In theory.
The final result.
I show only the front side of the house. You can literally see from the declining quality of the smarties shingling work the effects of hyperglycemia on the little ones. Since none of the parents stayed (at least at the beginning) I gave the kids free rein to eat as much of the candy as they wanted (until we started to run out before finishing the house!) They went through about 2 lbs of smarties. (Not bad for 8 kids.)
When the parents came to pick them up everyone stayed for a cup of Christmas cheer while the kids continued to suffer in the throes of glucose poisoning. Fortunately the playstation and DSs kept everyone more or less calm as the effects wore off.
Hopefully we'll have them all back in a couple of weeks for the smashing. Updates will follow.
