Little treats!

Simple soups are truly wonderful, really, and I know I said that Christmas was over in our house, but gingerbread houses are just what's required when you need a pick-me-up after the first day back at work and school!

Gingerbread house - before...

It's even better when the gingerbread house was a free blog giveaway from Simply Being Mum! Thanks Jo! We hadn't got around to making it until yesterday when we realised it would be just the thing to do to cheer us up on the last day of the holidays and to feed the extra mouths we have in the house after school on a Tuesday.

We passed a happy half hour constructing it and proved that:

• It's always worth entering blog giveaways!
• Aldi gingerbread houses travel through the post very well. The only thing to suffer was a sugar child's head and we managed to perform lifesaving surgery with a bit of icing.
• Maybe we need an icing bag, although at least our snow looks as if it is suitably melting into the New Year.
• Sugar decoration letters, with which we were going to write New Year messages on the roof, cannot be kept two years after their sell by date; I'd never seen a weevil before but I think I have now!
• Gingerbread still tastes nice in January; this is my favourite kind of soft gingerbread. In fact this is the best gingerbread house we've ever sampled; it beats an IKEA one we had a few years ago, that didn't want to stick together (although maybe that's hardly surprising given the reputation of some of their flat pack furniture...)
• And lastly, it takes no time at all for three hungry boys to deconstruct a gingerbread house:

Gingerbread house - after....