Sugar Cube Candy Houses

One of our family’s most beloved traditions is gingerbread houses or candy houses.

I don’t mind making the gingerbread from scratch because it gives us freedom to make them how we want. But…it’s just so darn time consuming.

I wasn’t feeling up to a full day of baking gingerbread this year, so I tried to think of an easier way. The kits seemed appealing but we were accumulating a ton of candy from Grandma, school, neighbors and had some left over from Halloween. I wanted to put all that to use and to give the kids a little more creative freedom than a kit allows.

I was in the baking aisle and spied these sugar cubes. Perfect!

I whipped up a batch of royal icing (Oopsey Daisy has a great recipe here) and then we got to work using the sugar cubes like little building blocks.

After a while, we learned that dipping a block in the icing and then setting it in place was the most efficient method…

…and so easy for little hands to do.

Once they got going, it didn’t take long for our table to turn into this.

The boys loved every minute, eating almost as much candy as they put on.

We got some peachy penguins. Some of them are swimming and some of them are cuddling (my contribution, of course).

I am careful about my kid’s candy consumption so my kids love that I let them gorge themselves once a year when we make these (well to a certain point). :)

Hope you are having a marvelous weekend.

I would apologize for all the Christmas posts, but we’ve already cleaned up Christmas around our house, so these posts are a way for me to hang onto that Christmas feeling a bit longer….(maybe I should have left up the lights…)