Our Gingerbread Houses - Christmas 2015

I started our Gingerbread House tradition back in 2012. I was inspired by ones that I'd seen on blogs and Pinterest, and so I added it to my Day Zero Project list. I spent ages fretting about my first Gingerbread House, but in the end it wasn't nearly as difficult as I expected it to be! I always use the same recipe from Tesco which includes an easy template and also a video to follow - you can find the Gingerbread House recipe here. The first house I made pretty much by myself, with Harry adding a few decorations under careful supervision.

Over the years I have adapted the recipe slightly, I decrease the amount of the wet ingredients by about 20% and by reducing the size at which I print the template to 75% it makes just enough dough for two slightly smaller gingerbread houses.

In 2013 we had two houses, and while I pretty much decorated Mia's house, Harry did it by himself. Then last year they were both very much involved in the decoration and loved making them.

So continuing tradition, here are the 2015 Jain Family Gingerbread Houses!

I made the gingerbread and assembled the houses but I had no role in the decoration apart from piping the icing where directed. Mia went with a pretty house, with jelly heart sweets on the roof and neat lines of chocolate buttons. Harry came up with an imaginative house which has sweets formed into the shape of a moose with antlers and a butterfly, and he embellished with a paper cut out snowman.

Now to see how long we can keep them around for before they are broken up and eaten!

Here are our previous Gingerbread Houses:

The very first gingerbread house

The 2013 Gingerbread Houses

The 2014 Gingerbread Houses

And here was our 2016 Gingerbread House which was also captured on video as part of Vlogmas 2016