Create a New Family Tradition: Gingerbread House Contest!

Holiday traditions provide a sense of belonging and comfort during a hectic season, and they also offer families the opportunity to create amazing memories together. As we look for new ways to create memories at home, I am reminded of something that brings out the kid in all of us - building gingerbread houses.

Instead of buying pre-packaged (and quite pricey) gingerbread house kits, we start with plain graham crackers, and make our own icing. It's really important to get the consistency right because this is the glue that will hold your whole masterpiece together.

Gingerbread House Icing

Ingredients:

Room temperature egg whites
3 cups (give or take) powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon Cream of Tartar

Directions:

In a mixing bowl, use a whisk or an electric mixer to mix the egg whites until they are foamy, then add in the cram of tartar and mix for another 30 seconds.
Add in about a 1/4 of the powdered sugar at a time and mix well.
Continue to mix the icing after all the powdered sugar has been added. It should get thicker and the icing should start to hold it's shape after about 3-4 minutes. That's when you know it's ready.

Depending on the number of people making gingerbread houses, you may want to double the recipe.

Once your icing is made, you are ready to begin building and decorating. The best part of this is that you can let your imagination soar! Don't feel that you need to stick to a traditional house. You'll need a lot of graham crackers, your homemade icing and lots of candy. Colorful candies work really well.

Want to turn it into a contest?

You can either create teams or make it every person for themself. If you have younger kids, you may want to partner-up in teams with one adult and one child on each team.

Each team starts with:

One package of graham crackers
One bowl of homemade icing

Shared decorations include:

Food coloring or gel to tint the frosting
Assorted small candies such as mints, gummy bears and worms, jelly beans, gum, licorice, sour candies, hard candies, gumdrops, mini candy canes.
Assorted snacks in fun shapes such as cereal, crackers, pretzels, cookies.
Assorted baking decorations, such as colored sugar, red hots, sprinkles.
Teams are also allowed to raid the cupboards and pantry if they check with me first! (Flour makes great snow!) But once it's on the table, it is for everyone to share.

Prepare your work area:

Cover the table with newspaper -- the candy and frosting get super messy! Provide bowls to mix colored frosting and plastic knives or spreaders that are safe for littles to use to spread the frosting. Make sure you provide a tray for each creation. We have found pizza pans, cookie trays, plastic trays from the dollar store, or even a piece of sturdy cardboard works well.

The creativity the teams show each year never fails to amaze us. We always give them full creative license to build whatever inspires them.

Look at some of these elaborate creations:


	A concert scene, with gummy bears as the audience.


	A storefront, complete with a "sale" sign!


	City brownstones.


	George Washington crossing the Delaware.


	An art gallery.

Sometimes, as you can see, the entries have nothing to do with houses at all. As the kids get older, it's so much fun to see their interests come alive through their construction efforts.

If you want to actually make it a true contest, post photos of the creations on Facebook (without telling who made each creation) and give your friends and family an hour or two to vote. To pass the time while you wait for the votes to come in, a good activity is watching a Christmas movie.

Of course, really everyone wins because it's a fun activity that the whole family enjoys, so if you don't want to make it into a contest, you certainly don't have to. The fun is in the creating... and then in the eating!

We want to see your creations!
Use #GingerbreadMKBerks when you post on social media. We'll be sharing creations on some of our social media pages, too!

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