December was such a busy month that we didn’t have time to make our annual gingerbread house. For the last few years we’ve tried different ready-made gingerbread house kits as every supermarket seems to make their own. This year we opted for Vintersaga Mini gingerbread house kit from Ikea which featured in my Gingerbread Gift Guide. The kit cost £2.95 and I picked up some of their other gingerbread products too (their gingerbread dough is my favourite!).

Mini gingerbread houses

This kit makes six mini gingerbread houses which can be decorated and hung on a tree. I picked up a set of three coloured icing pens, also from Ikea, as well as a box of red, white and green covered chocolate hearts from Flying Tiger. I thought these would be enough for the kids to decorate their own gingerbread houses.

Each house is made of six pieces of gingerbread – excuse my messy cutting board.

We used white icing to ‘glue’ the parts of gingerbread together. We built the gingerbread house before decorating it. The kids each made two gingerbread houses which left one each for me and my husband. You can see my daughter de-constructed her house so she could make a gingerbread house pinata filled with sweets.

The gingerbread houses are just the right size to build and decorate in an afternoon. This is an activity my kids always enjoy and they are easy to build. The kids raided the Christmas sweets and added everything they could find to decorate the little houses, although I kept mine simple with some coloured icing.

There were holes in the roof pieces to thread some ribbon through them and hang them from the tree, sadly ours didn’t last long enough for that.