Mad Craft #12: Holiday Edition – How Not to Build A Gingerbread House #holidaycraft

I thought I’d learned from my mistakes last year, but alas it seems there were new mistakes to make this year.

Step 1: Decide not to buy a namby pamby prefab gingebread house kit and make it your damn self. Dust off that old recipe with questionable scribbles and do a pretty nice job of it. Tell yourself, “you got this!”

Step 2: Don’t forget to make the back of the gingerbread house this year (we don’t want a repeat fiasco of having to ice a piece of cardboard to fill in the error now do we?). Oh, yeah, put on that door and fancy circle window.

Step 3: Learn that it is wiser to do most of the decorating prior to assembly so that everything dries flat and doesn’t try to slide off. Easier for the kids and they can each decorate a side. Nearly foil your own plans by almost messing up the royal icing even though it has only three ingredients.

Step 4: Strut around proudly that what you’ve done is turning out exceedingly well despite the too-big m&m candies and the royal icing you managed to pull off. Even gloat over the chimney even though one side is actually backwards. We’ll just hid that flaw with candy and icing. No worries.

Step 5: Assemble and realize…

You done F’d it up…

The roof is both too big and too small.

Epic Engineering fail.

Hide as much as possible with MOAR candy!

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Step 6: Distract the children with decorating the rest of the cookies so that they stop pointing out that you didn’t put the roof on right and forgot the chimney. But you can’t put it on ‘right’ because if you do the whole structure will collapses. And that chimney isn’t going anywhere.