Gingerbread Houses

This week was Gingerbread People week with the Little People, and that turned out to be lots of fun.  We didn't do gingerbread people last year as a theme, but I found lots of fun ideas on Pinterest and other places.

We culminated the week with making the houses gingerbread, which of course were not really made of gingerbread, but rather from graham crackers.  (We did, however taste gingerbread cookies and graph whether we actually liked the taste of gingerbread.  Surprisingly, most of them did.)

I was going to go with the traditional "frostingglue graham crackers on milk cartons", but I was not excited about the whole idea of collecting the milk cartons and then cleaning them before using, etc.  (The only mental picture I could summon when thinking about it was a bunch of used milk cartons and several bottles of bleach, which wasn't a really good combination to me at all.) Fortunately, I saw a great idea a friend at church had for making gingerbread houses in a much easier way and decided to try that.

You still use graham crackers of course, but you don't actually build any kind of cube with them.  Instead, you cut the tops of the crackers at an angle, as shown below.  You just do this with a regular sharp knife.  (According to my friend, you really need to use "real" graham crackers, meaning Honey Maid and not the generic ones.  This is because the generic ones are too crumbly and just - well, crumble when you cut them.)

I used a cracker that she had cut as a pattern, and then cut mine.

 I was cutting enough pieces to make 25 houses, and since 25 X 5 = 125, it was a lot of cutting.  I started out cutting one or two crackers at a time, but of course, it wasn't long into the process before I decided to start layering them up and cutting a bunch at once.  Because why cut two at time when you can cut eight at a time?

However, when I did this they didn't cut straight and got all cattywampus on me, and of course that will never do.  (Although, in truth, if I were going to assemble them myself I would have just cut on them some more to make them work.  Of course, all of this recutting might have made the house about two inches tall, but we would assign those houses to those height-challenged gingerbread people in the world.  However, since I was handing them off to a helpful parent to be assembled, I felt that they needed to be straight and well-cut.)

To actually make the houses, you take five cut pieces and frostingglue them together, as such:

Then you take two rectangular graham cracker pieces and frostingglue them on like this.
I was thinking about peanutbuttergluing this model together for clarity, but then thought - nah.  (Although that would have killed two birds with one stone, because I did end up eating peanut butter and graham crackers for lunch that day.)

I did use the royal icing recipe with the meringue powder in it, because my friend said that was the only way to go - that regular icing just wouldn't do.

Of course, when I finally got done with this long cutting process, I of course had a bunch of cut-off corners and rejected cattywampus pieces left over.  And a whole lot of crumbs everywhere, which can be good or bad, considering your perspective.  Bad if you're in charge of cleaning.  Good if you're a dog.

However, despite the lengthy process (and I didn't even have to frostingglue them together), they turned out to be very hardy little houses for the kids to decorate.  And they had a great time.

Here are some of their completed houses:

The "heavy on the roof and moderate on the front" design:

The "heavy on the roof and heavy on the front" design:

The "heavy on the roof and stockpile the ground for later" model:

All in all, it was a great project for the Little People, and hopefully we can do it again next year.

Spiders

I've been having a little spiderweb-making session at home this morning in preparation for school today.  I of course got this idea on Pinterest.  Here is the pin itself, with the link to the instructions:

Source: momendeavors.com via Julie on Pinterest

I thought this was a fun idea, so I decided to include it in this week's "Friendly Spiders" festivities. 

I could see right away that the pretzel webs would need to be preassembled, since I thought it would be tricky to add the webbage without some sort of stability.  (Actually, I really just imagined the scenario of a well-meaning Little Person brushing up against the pretzels while piping on the web and knocking the pretzels awry.  Then I repeated this mental picture in my head 21 times and decided to preassemble them.)

Therefore, I piped out a thick center of white chocolate to the wax paper and then added the pretzels.  I started with six pretzels, but quickly moved to eight.  The chocolate firmed up pretty quickly, and then I could stack them in my containers for the move to school.

In fact, here they are, ready for transport. 

Despite the fact that today is a little cooler, I still intend to shade them in the car and to not tarry on the way, since some strong sunlight could wreak havoc on their Web Stability.

After I got the webs ready, I started on the spiders.  The original website suggested raisins as a possibility as spiders, but I found that I didn't like this option.  Mainly because the raisin on the web didn't really look like a spider.   Well, perhaps like one of those spiders you find in the corner of your garage - dead and all rolled up in a spider ball.  Which was kind of a gross mental image, really.

Instead, I went with chocolate spiders.  And llet me tell you, the next time you're sitting at a church potluck and someone casually comments to you about how easy chocolate spiders are to make, you have my express permission to scoff at them and disagree.  I found them quite hard to make.  Especially when I was had the melted chocolate in the cheap sandwich baggies, and new holes kept opening up in the baggie.  It is truly hard to add only eight legs to a spider's body with three holes of chocolate oozing out.  Because we all know that 3 + 3 + 3 does not equal eight.

The result of the chocolate spider challenge was that I a)changed baggies to one of those heavier Ziploc bags, and b)made larger and larger spiders since they were easier to make anatomically correct.  The final result was spiders much closer to tarantula size, which might be alarming to any Little Person if they were made of anything other than chocolate.

However, I suppose that's the saving feature in all of this.  They're edible and are made largely of chocolate, so how can I go wrong?



As always, I'll let you know how it goes.

Spider Web Report

Well, it seems like ages ago, but we did actually make our spider web treats at school.  Naturally, the kids just loved them.  My original plan was to make enough pretzel web bases for everyone to make one to eat at school and one to take home.  However, it became quickly apparent that this was going to take way too much time.  Plus there was the logistical problems of keeping enough of the white chocolate heated up and ready, which took multiple trips to the microwave, which slowed everything down.  Of course, you don't want to cook the chocolate too much, because then it gets all hard and crusty - kind of like old, dried up toothpaste.  You also have to watch out to make sure that the chocolate is not too hot to hold for the kids, either.  That can also be a deterrent to good web-making.

All in all, we got through it all just fine.  In general, it just reminded me that it's always better to do cooking projects at school when we have all of the teachers free to help, or at least one parent volunteer there.  Because it gets hectic and messy and crazy, but of course the kids are just excited, and they ALL want to make their spiderweb RIGHT NOW, and I feel like I spend most of my time just shooing/ordering them to GO AWAY, that I will call them when I'm ready for them.  Which is not ever very fun - at least not as fun as you would think making chocolate spider webs would be. 

Live and learn, of course.  Here is one of the child-made webs.  (Notice the little spiders drawn onto her fingernails - it was "Spiders on our Hands" Day, as well.