- Don’t believe the instructions that say that gingerbread houses are easy to assemble. Any sensible parent knows otherwise.
- Don’t bother using the toothpaste glue that tries to pass itself off as icing, but is more like quick-hardening cement.
- Hot glue the gingerbread house pieces together. I came up with this brilliant scheme this morning, and it worked beautifully. Of course, my children shouted in dismay, “But then we can’t eat it!” “We don’t eat it anyway,” I reasoned. “Yes, we do. We ate it last year.” “You did?” “Yes.” “Okay, well, I’ll make cookies, and you can eat cookies till you puke. How about that?” My children just shrugged their shoulders. They know better than to argue with their mother.
- If you use icing from a can (that you normally would put on a cake), the icing spreads a lot more easily. The only drawback is that it doesn’t harden. But why does it have to harden anyway? Who makes these rules?
- Make sure there is plenty of candy, so that one of your sons isn’t hogging all the candy on his side of the roof, while your daughter starts crying that all the candy is gone, and only half of her rooftop is decorated.
- If you run out of candy, you can use chocolate chips in a pinch, but be forewarned that they look like giant black thumbtacks.
- If you use the real self-hardening cement icing, make sure to clean it up immediately. Otherwise it turns as hard as stone and is impossible to clean up. You’ll have to scrape it off with a paint scraper.
I hope you enjoyed my gingerbread house tips!
