Have you ever built a gingerbread house?  We built our first one a couple years ago with a pre-made set that we were gifted by Seth’s sister.  Every year since then I have all the good intentions of making our own and being able to check it off the Christmas bucket list.  Then every year I remember that there is no way I’d even know where to start!  Thank goodness for Adventure Clubs who made it easy for us this year.

This adventure was given to us by Adventure Clubs

(you can also win your own adventure, so keep reading)

We popped on to the Adventure Clubs app (which is a really nifty little app) and looked through the adventures.  There were so many to choose from.  You could build a gingerbread house, visit the fire station and if my memory serves one of the adventures was even popping into a Doctors office to see how the back works!  How crazy cool is that?  There is something for any kid to enjoy and a great way to explore their specific interests.

Anyway, back to our adventure.  I want to quickly set the stage for you…

If you live in Cape Town you’ll remember last week where the hottest day in the history of forever hit the Cape.  That may be a slight exaggeration.   But probably not.  I swear I had moments where I thought we could save on gas/electricity and cook our supper on the roof of the car!  If we didn’t melt before then anyway.

So we pull up to the lovely restaurant of Vovo Telo in Steenberg, who regularly host a variety of fun baking adventures for Adventure Clubs.  Each table had moms with their kids huddled around their gingerbread houses.  Each little house was individually packaged with the walls, roof, door and variety of decorations to go on the top.

You can buy these pre-packaged houses directly from the VoVo Telo in Steenberg only.  You know, if you want to make your own at home.

(Also this picture of my boy and that smile!  SWOON!)

After a quick explanation of how to do this we got cracking.  You needed to mix your icing sugar with the egg whites that were already set out for you on the table.  So the kids took turns in working their little arm muscles.  We thought our mixture was the perfect “cement” consistency and patted ourselves on the back.  Then moments later found out that if we’d used it like that, we’d never have gotten anything out the icing funnel when we were ready to ice it.  Thank goodness for the head baker that was doing her rounds to help us out!

We tried so hard to get our house to stand up properly.  We used our cups and everything on the table to prop it up but I don’t know if it was the heat or the lack of expertise on my side but wow.  It was like the crooked witches house haha.  The the next thing we knew, the wall broke.

Then the roof broke.

Then we realised we’d put our walls together in the wrong place.  As it turns out the many hands make light work does not apply to gingerbread house making!  Thankfully they had extra pieces and we had the help of the ever so patient head chef/baker we got our house standing with its roof on.

Despite the whole thing collapsing on us a couple times, I think the hardest thing about building a gingerbread house with children is to stop them eating all the sweets that are meant for decoration!  I’m not sure that anyone outside of our direct family would want to eat it because of how many times the fingers went into their mouths haha.

With everything finally standing, it was time to get decorating!

Despite the roof falling off again, we managed to fix it when we got home.  I think it just needed less hands attacking, uh, I mean attending it.  Now our house is standing proudly on the counter, waiting to be inhaled by the children.  They literally stare at it every morning.

I’d like to say that our house looked as awesome as this one, but that would be a lie.  This one is what we can all aspire to though!

WIN WITH ADVENTURE CLUBS!

I’d really love for you to have an awesome adventure with your kids any one of the Adventure Clubs outings.  So you can head over to the FACEBOOK PAGE HERE, to enter.

Even if you don’t win this, I would really recommend downloading the app and checking it to see which adventures are happening that your kids will love.  The great thing is that they sometimes there’s even free ones where you just need to rock up to go on a fun new adventure and meet other moms.

I seriously wish this was around just after I had kids!  It’s a great way to meet moms in the same stage of life as you.  There’s even a handy chat feature on every adventure that you can connect with all that are going, ask questions etc.  I love that.