HOUSTON – We hate slamming any kind of sweet, but gingerbread is just terrible.
Luckily, there’s a way to make a gingerbread house without the gingerbread and using common candies like peanut butter cups, chocolate bars, Twizzlers, Jolly Ranchers, Hershey kisses and whatever else you might have on hand.
We spotted this creation on Walmart.com via Pinterest. We decided to try it out.
Here are the ingredients we used, but we’re a little EXTRA around here.
Before we begin talking about this project, let us make this clear: We did not eat this house. So if you see bare hands and hair not in hair nets, know that no one was in danger of eating this. We do recommend wearing gloves and following other sanitary practices if you do plan to eat your chocolate house.
We started with the walls of the house, slathering the joints with icing in a plastic bag, the corner cut so that icing could be applied. It’s a DIY option to a pastry bag, though as we learned, you probably want to use a thick storage bag over a regular sandwich-type bag. (Ours burst when we had a particular moment of inspiration.)
And one thing on the icing...you may want to skip it all together if you don’t plan to eat your chocolate house. This was a pro tip from KPRC 2 meteorologist Caroline Brown. She said rather sagely from the beginning of the construction that we’d not regret using a glue gun and that we’d be thanking her if we did. How we wish we would have followed that! The icing was okay, but not great at adhering everything together. Oh well, ya live and learn. There’s always next year! And then there’s this even more pro-tip that tells you how to turn your glue gun into a sugar glue gun. Whoa. Mind blown.
The walls went up and then we tried applying the Kit Kat roof, as shown in the tutorial. It did not go as planned. We recommend doing something else for your roof or going the glue gun route. We tried over and over to get the roof to stand, but the weight of it made the walls collapse. We almost gave up through our laughing and then had another idea. Another candy, a stronger roof foundation.
We placed the fallen Kit Kat bars on top of the Hershey walls to make a flat roof foundation and then started to use Twix bars to make an A-frame peaked roof that we thought made the entire structure resemble a cathedral.
We found this worked and everything seemed to remain standing, so we continued to build out the decorative elements: pools of icing that resembled snow, a marshmallow snowman, gummy bears in the snow icing, peanut butter and Hershey kiss bushes, and blue sprinkles to make it all sparkle.
Take a look at the photos below and be sure to watch our trial-and-error time lapse video in the player above.
We had a lot of fun making this and recommend for families. This may or may not be your holiday dinner centerpiece, but it’ll sure help create some memories.
Have you tried a project like this before? What tips do you have? Let us know in the comments! We’re all ears.