Just constructed a gingerbread house

[cupcakesbakingonanopenfire]

and burnt my fingers on the melted sugar.
Anyone else made one of these? This was a kit from Ikea (the Anna brand) so the gingerbread pieces were already made. I found it so hard to construct though, hence the burnt fingers. It kept toppling over or the sugar would set before I could get the pieces in place.
Will decorate tomorrow with mini white marshmallows, white buttons and dolly mixtures.

yes! made one from scratch yesterday...but baked cakes and shaped them as house, and stuck the gingerbread slabs on to the cake with apricot jam...much easier, and more likely to stay together!

I made one yeaterday too- baked gingerbread walls and stuck together with royal icing. Its dry now so will decorate tomorrow mornign with dd! So excited!

the cakes sounds a good idea.
I saw a recipe in a magazine to make your own biscuit walls and they were stuck together with piped icing. But I could only find one tube left at the shop (the recipe recommended using 2) so I thought I'd follow the box's instructions with the melted sugar. Wish I'd just made my own icing.
Am really looking forward to decorating.

oooh we made some last weekend, I am kicking myself for not taking pictures of them (they have been eaten now!)

Really takes two people to construct - we did them round at a friend's house. The children held the walls together, with a bit of thick icing on each one, then she dripped icing down the joins. They then sat holding the walls for about 5 mins .

They decorated them with smarties and jelly tots - they looked (and tasted) fab.

yes, I really needed another pair of hands (it was too hot to risk spilling on ds).

oh we made an Ikea one last year when we were in France
looked brilliant
put it in a shoebox and drove it back all the way to Bristol (a good 12 hours...)
then dd took it to school to show

will make it again this year actually
but you do need two pairs of hands

My DD and I did the Ikea one last year - but it was a bit of a disaster. Just would NOT "glue" together! So we ate it....

It is a nice kit - with the door detail and the tiles on the roof. Would be better if it had some kind of slotting together system that held it in place whilst the sugar/icing set.

I made one of the kit ones this week with ds1. We did not have any problem with it. I melted icing sugar until it went brown and used as the glue. It set very quickly and quite sturdily. Most of it has been eaten now

I put ours together on my own- just propped up jam jars etc around it!

wish I'd thought of that!
Have just decorated - it looks much better now! I'd forgotten to get anything for pudding tomorrow so this will do nicely!

we made one, and used ready made icing to 'glue' it together!

also did a deep layer of this icing ("snow") which sort of almost supported the walls by themselves IUCWIM.

we had lots of fun making (and eating) it!

I constructed ours this evening just about managing to avoid burning myself but some of the pieces were already broken so had to dip and glue them back togehter first. The children are going to decorate it this evening and then settle down to a film then bed