I went to one of my favorite stores, World Market, about a week or so ago. They have over 250 locations across the United States. The store is incredible. They have foods, coffees, beverages and more from all over the world - I am definitely in my element in a store like that :) Anyways, I was in there picking up some coffee and looking for chocolate Advent calendars for the kids. For the past several years, I have been buying the Christmas gingerbread house kits from World Market. The kits were already out, but I decided to hold off for a while until a coupon comes along in the newspaper :) I don't know that I've ever seen a kit for making Halloween houses in the store, but a few of the Halloween books that I took out from the library showed some pretty cool Halloween houses. They were made out of graham crackers and store bought canned frosting. I was EXTREMELY skeptical that canned frosting would hold the house together. Much to my surprise it actually works!
I took a sandwich sized zipper lock bag, filled it with about two tablespoons of frosting, pushed it down towards one end of the bag and snipped a very small corner off. Instant decorator bag :) I found an old cookie sheet and covered it with foil to put the house on. I used four graham crackers for the base of the house putting the frosting on the edges. I then used another four crackers for the roof. Two went length wise and two went width wise. I would recommend letting it sit about 1-2 hours to dry, but if you're impatient like I was, you don't have to!
Dominic was my assistant for this experiment, he made most of the roof decorations. What I liked best about making it ourselves is how inexpensive it was. I used the Kroger brand graham crackers and frosting that was on sale :) The little pumpkins and candy corns came out of an "Autumn Mix" from Meijer. The semi-sweet chocolate morsels I already had in my pantry. The Smarties and M&M's were snitched out of our stockpile of candy that we're getting ready to hand out in a few weeks for Halloween. Let your imagination be your inspiration for how to decorate!!
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