It’s Sunday afternoon and we’re strolling the grocery aisles humming along to Christmas songs while shopping for the week’s meals when Derek notices a DIY Gingerbread House kit. The box came with pre-baked, ready-to-assemble walls with candies and bagged frosting for $14.99. It looked like a fun Christmas activity that neither of us had done before but hesitated with the simple cookie-cutter design. What if we made our own instead? I snagged a recipe from Food Network and Derek made a beeline for the candy aisle for ingredients.

My husband was the official blender of the evening, operating the electric mixer for the gingerbread dough and homemade icing. The gingerbread was supposed to stick together but was crumbling apart so I used my hands to knead the dough and pat it together into a brick shape. The icing was much too thick with the above recipe so we added another 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract and a Tablespoon of water to loosen it up. The dough had to chill in the fridge for about 20 minutes to stiffen so we researched our gingerbread ideas and created a template.

In honor of our love for camping and hiking trails, we decided to create a Gingerbread Tepee Tent and drew a paper template that was 3 inches wide by 5 inches tall. The dough was then ready to be kneaded and rolled out on a cookie sheet. I traced five sides for the tent with 1 side cut out with an open door with enough dough leftover for some experimental creations like a sleeping bag, fishing pole, logs for a fire, and our cat, Sprout.

The gingerbread creations were placed on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and baked for roughly 15-20 minutes. We let them sit on the counter for about 5 minutes until they were cool enough to touch. Unfortunately, the cat, sleeping bag, and fishing pole didn’t quite bake in the shapes we had sculpted but the tepee sides came out perfectly. Thin, flat objects like our logs for the fire worked best.

Placing the pieces together was a bit tricky at first but with two pairs of hands, anything can be done. I spread the icing on the edges of two pieces and Derek held them together. Note: I ended up taking it apart and chopping off the top of my tepee sides to create a flat edge on top of the triangles because they didn’t fit together well. We also only needed to use 5 sides for the tent instead of the 6 we had baked. As more pieces were added and the icing began to harden, this process became easier. We filled in the seams and base edges with a layer of icing on the cookie sheet for support. Once the tepee could stand on its own, we set about decorating with the icing acting as a glue.

Some of our unique features included the campfire pit, a candy sliced canoe docked on the edge of an M&M lake, a trail lined with of chocolate chips, a snow angel in the powdered sugar snow, and the top of the gingerbread tent marked in licorice with A+D for Ashley & Derek, like couples carve into trees all over the world. It is the candy version of our winter wonderland in the woods.

The entire baking process took just over 90 minutes but lasted an entire evening of holiday cheer with Sprout sniffing around our toes as we decorated. If you have a choice between a pre-assembled kit or baking homemade gingerbread, the Jagers believe that it’s worth the extra effort to build a Candyland paradise of your own.