First of all, It's so good to finally write a post again! I can't believe it's been a few years. I have been pretty busy with my kids these days. Brenden is now 14, Kiki is 11, Garren is about to turn 8 in a few days, and Rowen is 5.
Kiki and I were looking through pictures the other day and saw a craft we did around halloween last year. With fun halloween candy, chocolate graham crackers, and chocolate icing we made Halloween Gingerbread houses. This is literally one of our FAVORITE craft/activities to do. I'm sure the kids love it the most because of all the CANDY that I normally don't let them have too much of. LOL This got our minds spinning on how we can make summer gingerbread houses.
We thought it would be fun to make the house look more like a tiki hut and for it to be in a tropical setting.
Here is a picture of the stuff we bought from Target to make our summer gingerbread houses. The only thing not pictured is goldfish and some cereal we used.
After you have all of your supplies you have to set up your bases. For our halloween gingerbread houses we just used halloween paper plates but we knew we would want more space to create an island and water so we used cardboard from an amazon box. We cut out squares of cardboard and wrapped them in foil. Then you take your small empty milk carton and hot glue it to the base. The kids all chose their houses to be glued in different spots.
After your bases are all set you will need to make your "sand" and your "water". To make "sand" you can crush up graham crackers or cereal. This step is fun for kids. Just add whatever you are going to use for the "sand" in a ziplock bag and something tough for the kids to hit the bag and crush the crackers/cereal. We used a mix of Cheerios and Kix cereal because we didn't have a ton of graham crackers. Now, to make your "water", just mix some blue food coloring into your vanilla icing.
Let the kids decorate their house first. We used graham crackers along with pretzel sticks and we even used cinnamon toast crunch cereal for the roof on some. Get as creative as you want. Then after the house is decorated add some white icing around the base of it to make your land. Sprinkle your "sand" on the icing with a spoon. Then use the blue icing to make the water on the rest of your base.
Before we went crazy and just decorated the houses, Kiki and I wanted to create palm trees. We thought hard about the easiest way to create these. First, the trunk is the most realistic when using Pirouette wafer cookies. The next step was to make the palm leaves. We experimented with green sour patch kids and green sour streamers. The best was cutting the sour streamers into a leaf shape because we found that the sour patch kids were heavier and it came apart a few times before the icing finally made it all stick together.
Here are what the palm trees looked like when done. We just used three "leaves" per tree. We used the white icing to stick the leaves to the top of the pirouette wafer cookie. Then we set them in a glass cup to harden a little before adding them to the houses.
This is how we added the palm tree to the house. We just put some icing on the bottom and up one side of the tree and pushed it against one side of the house. This picture is cool cause you can see how Kiki used pretzel sticks and cinnamon toast crunch to make her house look like a tiki hut.
After you have the house, sand, water, and palm tree then you have the fun of adding all the candy to decorate your house and island. I just gave each kid a plate with all the different stuff we bought.
The kids will need more white icing for this step so they can stick candy to their houses.
Jax and Row decorating their summer gingerbread houses.
Garren decorating his house. Gummy rings are fun for this cause you can use them as floaties in the water. Also sour patch kids were the perfect size to use as people. Garren was the first to use the sour streamers as towels on the sand, which I thought was a fun idea.
Kiki made a little dock and a "person" on a chaise lounge sunning.
We think they all turned out so well that we had to share our craft idea with you.
We hope you are all enjoying your summer.
