Gingerbread House!

As most of you know, I was given Wilton pre-baked gingerbread house kit to assemble and review for you. I was excited when I got the box and felt how heavy it was. I opened it up and was pretty pleased with the selection of candies, bags, tips and icing that came included with the gingerbread pieces.

Here is the Wilton Gingerbread Shop where they have several different types of gingerbread houses to choose from. Go take a look!

 

Looks good, right? Lots of stuff to choose from, directions (with pictures) of 3 different decorating options.

I was all set up, let the decorating Begin!

Here are the finished house pictures:

The front. I didn't follow the directions very well and kind of made up my house as I went along. I'm a rebel.

The roof line.

Side view.

Full side view. :)

Finished house.

 See those little fingers over there on the right? They are waiting for me to get done taking pictures so she could steal some candy. I've had to keep the house hidden so they wouldn't cannibalize it before I got any pictures taken of it.

All in all I was on the fence about this kit. It had some definite pros and cons.  I had to assemble the house, which was ok with me. It did have a couple issues (in my opinion at least). I don't think there was enough icing to do everything that the instructions tell you to do. I have some cake decorating experience and I had to improvise some of the decorating because there just wasn't enough icing mix to do everything they said you could do in the example pictures. The second issue it had was the one of the roof pieces was pretty crooked. It made putting the house together kind of hard and then trying to get the gap covered was difficult. We finally got what I would call a "good side" and decorated from there.

So, what's my final opinion on the kit? I don't think that for the price point ($39.99) I would purchase it. That being said, I am kind of cheap and I do think that there was a lot to offer with the kit. Honestly, though, for the price and the fact that it was a Wilton product, I would have expected it to be simple to put together for even the most novice of gingerbread house construction crews. The fact that some of the walls were crooked and that there wasn't enough icing to really decorate like they demonstrate would be very frustrating to most people.

Bottom line, I expected more from this than it delivered. However, I'm going to assume that my kit was a fluke and that most of them don't have the issues that mine did. I really want to give it a better review than this, because I LOVE Wilton products, but it simply wasn't up to the standards that I have come to expect from Wilton.

I have had really good success with their pre-assembled houses (I usually get one or two for the kids to decorate every year) and I think that from now on I'll just stick with those.

Wilton provided me with a kit to review and a kit to give away. As always, these opinions are mine.