Gingerbread building, making gummies and the most youthful Santa we’ve ever seen

We’ve been pretty busy this last little while taking many different holiday classes.  A really neat one we tried this week was the kids’ baking class at the PCC grocery store.

We learned how to make an egg-free gingerbread recipe which is awesome when you cook with kids and worry about them eating raw-egg. The boys loved being in a real cooking studio/kitchen (we went to the one at Green Lake) and really concentrated on making their gingerbread people.

It was a little embarrassing at one point when one boy decided to point out his anatomically correct snowman, but I don’t think the other moms’ heard, so I was pretty thankful.

And they loved taking their treats home in the decorated bags we made there.  So much so that they’ve been wanting to stick stickers on everything at home this week since the class.

I was thrilled that we had taken cooking to the next level, and had some little friends over to make gingerbread houses this week too.  I had seen a recipe for making your own gummies, so I thought we could make them ourselves so we could have our own cool candy shapes.  It’s pretty much Jello and extra gelatin.  And this is what we ended up with:

Theses were okay.  I have to admit I think I’ve made these before because I truly suck at making jello and it usually ends up with a hard part on top and watery soup down below-these tasted like the hard part.  But I think I need to revisit this recipe because it was cool and the kids liked rubbing cornstarch on the back of the gummies and taking them out of the molds.

We didn’t use them for our houses, but I did use this pre-made dough:

For about $2.50 a roll from Fred Meyer (I used two) it worked surprisingly well to make 5 little houses (it should have been 6 but a couple pieces got squished and broken in a building accident) using the template I found here.

Here are the naked houses.  I used this recipe to make the “glue”.  And I just scooped a bunch of the icing into ziplock bags so we could snip the corners off and let the kids go wild with decorating.

Here is what houses built by three-year olds look like.

And pictures of the creating session will come soon. (With 4 kids in the kitchen I left this task to my friend and neither of us got to make any gingerbread houses either-we will have to revisit this craft again next year!)

We rounded off the week with a visit to Kelsey Creek Farm to see Santa and ride on a tractor. We could see him on the top of the hill as we walked in and it was pretty cool to see them get excited and yell “Hi Santa, we’re coming!!!”

The boys loved getting candy canes and had a good little visit with Santa.

So far this one wins the most youthful Santa prize, I think.

But kudos to him for getting these guys to sit and smile.   Thank you Santa!  What a fantastic week.  Happy Friday!

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