Our 2nd year of making gingerbread houses. Ambitions were higher this year; no store-bought kits here any more! The kids and I designed our own houses and actually managed to assemble them all (which was not a given, considering how crooked some of the pieces were).

I don’t understand how people manage to assemble these houses with icing. We tried, and after 10 or 15 minutes it had still not set fully. So we scraped it all off and went back to last year’s method using melted sugar. Much faster and more robust.

I was so annoyed by the icing that I threw it all out, so we went back to store-bought icing for decorations. It doesn’t flow very well so it’s hard to get the lines nice and even. Next year I think it’ll be sugar for glueing but homemade icing for decoration.