Life With The Speeds: M&S Gingerbread House by Mollie and Emily

WOW! One of our advent gifts was this cute little Gingerbread House Kit from Marks and Spencer, we couldn't wait to get started on it. Mum lets us do cooking by ourselves (with a little help with the oven) so we had to read the ingredients and instructions first to make sure we had everything we needed.

The ingredients we needed were clearly listed on the front; butter, golden syrup and water. the rest of the stuff was in the box. So we got these together plus all the mixing bowls and spoons we needed.

Mum put the oven on for us (190C/375F/Gas Mark 5.) We then rubbed butter all over the baking trays, Emily really enjoyed this bit!

Mum also told us another trick, to dust the baking trays with flour, this really helps things not to stick!

Then we unpacked the box.

Everything we needed was clearly labelled and the instructions were printed on the side of the box so this was going to be nice and easy to bake.

Firstly we had to open the gingerbread mix, add the butter, golden syrup and water (we actually needed less water than it said so we ended up having to add plain flour to our mixture to make it into dough.)

Once we had the dough we had to knead it and then roll it out to about half a cm thick. At first we did it too thin so we had to do it again.

Then we had to cut out the shapes needed, the kit came with templates to cut round and we needed two roof pieces and two wall pieces, one of these needed a door cut out of it too. The we had to cut as many gingerbread men as possible or wanted from the leftover dough. This part was REALLY tricky and we gave up after 4! Instead we cut out some flower shapes using one of our cookie cutters, we thought we could make a garden around the house with these.

Then we baked them. It took two batches to get them all baked and each tray was in for about 7 minutes. Then we left them to cool.

When they had cooled we opened the icing mix and added a little water at a time to make a thick icing. The kit also came with an icing bag to fill and we just had to snip off the end.

We started to put the house together but it was really hard so we needed to call mum through to help us. We had to use all sorts of things to help us prop it together whilst it set!