Have you ever battled with pieces of gingerbread in a feeble attempt at making the picture-perfect Gingerbread House? Last year's attempt at Chocolatier.co.uk Towers with my five-year-old didn't go well.
Despite using copious amounts of icing sugar to ensure structural stability, the whole thing collapsed if anyone dared glance at it. It also tasted absolutely foul.
This year, I might try my hand at something more up my street if I can get my hands on a new kit from Cadbury.
By means of background, Cadbury recently launched a 120g Dairy Milk Winter Gingerbread Edition Bar° for Christmas which blends Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate with warming festive spices of ginger, cloves, and cinnamon. It retails for around £1.50 and is available in most supermarkets. But they didn't stop there.
They've used it as the basis for creating a special Cadbury Dairy Milk Christmas Cottage Kit°. That's right, no fiddling around with fragile sheets of gingerbread this year - instead, the Christmas Cottage is built out of chunky slabs of chocolate!
The 861g kit - which is suitable for vegetarians - costs £16 and is available online (although it seems the website is struggling to keep up with demand).
The box contains:
- 2 Cadbury Dairy Milk 200g bars
- 2 Cadbury Dairy Milk Winter Wonderland Edition 100g bars
- 2 Cadbury Dairy Milk Winter Gingerbread Edition 120g bars
- A 32g bag of Cadbury White Buttons
- 2 Treatsize (14.5g) Cadbury Flakes
You'll need to exercise your knife skills to create the gable ends from the gingerbread chocolate. The regular Dairy Milk bars form the side of the cottage. Melt the offcuts (holding back a couple of cubes) to form a Dairy Milk 'glue' to hold everything together.
The two-tone Winter Wonderland bars with their Christmas tree patterns form the roof, and the Flakes trims the apex.
Whip up some icing sugar with water to form a thick glacé icing that you can use to create snow along the roofline. You can also use it as glue to hold the white chocolate buttons onto the cottage.
Remember those spare Dairy Milk cubes? Assuming you haven't gobbled them up by now, they'll become the chimney. Et voila, a complete Cadbury Christmas Cottage!
It sounds like a fun, creative project to make with the kids, and you can embellish it further. Perhaps add some colourful Maynards Bassetts Midget Gems to represent strings of twinkling Christmas lights? Maynards Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts would help add colour to a surrounding garden. Let the kids run wild with their imagination and see what happens.
Get your own Cadbury Dairy Milk Christmas Cottage Kit
Will you be trading in the traditional gingerbread house for a Cadbury Christmas Cottage this year? Let me know in the comments below.
