The first step is to trim the graham crackers to make the pieces for the front and back of each house. Use the short end of a graham cracker as your template when cutting the crackers. I used Honey Maid brand and found that I also needed to trim off the bottom "row" of each cracker so they weren't too tall when constructing the hosues.
Next, I trimmed large rectangular cake boards (cut each into 4 smaller rectangles) to act as the bases for each house, prepped my pastry bag and dug out my Wilton spreader. Make sure you have a Venti Mocha from Starbucks on hand as it takes up to 4-6 hours to construct 15 houses when you have a 3 and 4-year-old to tend to during the whole process.
Be sure to place a damp kitchen towel over your mixer as you begin to make the royal icing. The last thing that you want is powdered sugar ALL over your kitchen! I use Wilton's Royal Icing recipe.
We used tons of candy--M & M's, Skittles, Dots, gumdrops, sugar cones for trees, etc., to decorate the houses. The kids had a wonderful time and were all on a sugar high after they finished decorating their houses. Surprisingly, only a few kids were more interested in eating the treats than decorating.
Here is Ian's second gingerbread house:
And here he is proudly sitting in front of his house waiting for the fourth and final gingerbread house workshop/playdate to begin.
Nathan's second gingerbread house:
Nathan LOVED decorating the houses and couldn't wait to take this picture so that we could show it to Daddy when he returned home.
