Today I decided to take a break from my usual creative outlet of writing and do something equally creative but a lot more challenging for me–help the children make the annual gingerbread cottage. We create a gingerbread house every year, but this year we knew we had to up our game. We discovered Sykes Cottages was running a competition to create a gingerbread cottage with the incentive of offering one lucky family a £500 voucher towards one of their holiday cottages, and after looking at their website and the cottages on offer, we were keen to enter. Here are the details of the competition and here is their website with some amazing properties to hire.
I’m not the least bit artistically inclined, but thankfully my daughters had strong ideas about how they wanted to decorate the gingerbread cottage. Effectively, they wanted to add every sweet and biscuit we could find from the shops and then cover the cottage in icing sugar to look like snow.
Here are the many sweets and treats my daughters chose. Fortunately, we didn’t quite use all of them!
After I assembled the cottage, my six year old placed the first sweet in position.
A very excited six year old putting on the first decoration.
Before placing any further pieces on the main body of the cottage, my 11 year old decided we should decorate the roof. She chose to cover it with Party Ring biscuits.
The Party Rings were filled with bright candy discs, and then surrounded by rainbow-coloured strings of balls. For the chimney, they chose half a Twirl bar because only using half of it meant they could eat the other half. And still on a rainbow theme, they topped the roof with gumdrops in a rainbow sequence.
We like our bright colours and rainbow sequences!
The girls then tackled the sides with more bright-coloured balls, asking me only to outline the windows and doors so they could cover the icing in candy snowflakes and white and blue pearl balls.
And now a side view.
I thought we were finished at this point, but the girls informed me that we needed to add lots of snow, as well as our snowman and Father Christmas. The youngest sprinkled icing sugar on the cottage, while licking at the air as it floated down, and the eldest poured caster sugar on a baking tray.
Next came Santa and Frosty. As you can see, our snowman didn’t start white. He got a good dusting as well.
Because we still had some chocolate buttons we hadn’t used, the girls laid them down as a path to the cottage. Last but not least, they piled up white candies in front of Father Christmas and the snowman so that they could have a snowball fight–something my girls LOVE to do but haven’t had the opportunity to do yet this year.
Let it snow, let is snow, let it snow!
They were very pleased with their final creation and couldn’t wait to show it off. Here it is–we hope you and Sykes Cottages like it as much as we do! And if we do win the voucher, we’ll be sure and tell you all about our holiday in a post next year. If not, we’re still winners because we had a blast making it and can’t wait to eat it. YUM! Happy Christmas all!
