Cadbury Dairy Milk Christmas Chocolate House Kit 840g

Product Information

We liked the flavour when we tasted it, but we found the texture dense and chewy. If experience and appearance is more important to you than eating the gingerbread, we think this is the best kit you can buy. Our verdict:Ideal if you're not keen on gingerbread, but it's messy to build and will likely end up covered in fingerprints. However, as you start to run low the tube takes a lot of squeezing. Our hands were cramping up towards the end.

Four expert tips to help you build your gingerbread house 1) Plan what you want to do before you start The gingerbread house pieces in this kit are smooth and plain, so there's no indication of how you might go about decorating it. The instructions advise that you draw your design fully before starting so you know exactly what you're going to be doing with your piping bag. 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. It's worth having a look online at a few gingerbread house design templates if you're struggling for ideas.Consider buying a gingerbread house kit with a base if you want a speedier, stress-free building experience. The two-tone Winter Wonderland bars with their Christmas tree patterns form the roof, and the Flakes trims the apex. However, we thought there wasn't quite enough icing to really go to town on the decoration. We'd recommend keeping the pre-made icing for another baking day and making a big batch of your own to ensure you don't run out. Once the house was up we were pleased with its appearance, and we really had to fight the urge to chomp on the chimney, which is a Flake.

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! Our verdict:We had a bit of a disaster building this gingerbread campervan, and were disappointed with the kit overall. Similar to the Biscuiteers gingerbread house kit, the house pieces are blank. You're probably best off planning how you want to decorate the house before starting out. You're asked to melt a certain amount of the chocolate in the microwave and use it as cement. As fun (and messy) as that was, we thought that melted chocolate was an ineffective cement compared to icing. But if you want your house to be a real centrepiece, you'll want to give yourself some thinking time beforehand to work out what you'd like to do with the included decorations and which patterns you'd like to pipe with your icing.As we found with John Lewis' pre-made icing, the icing in this kit was runny and didn't hold the pieces together very securely.

As soon as the icing hits the gingerbread it'll start to dry and set, so you'll get into trouble if you change your mind about your decoration halfway through. 2) Look up designs if you need inspiration It saves you a task if your gingerbread house kit comes with icing included, but you'll need to decide if the amount that's included is enough for what you plan to do.The festive season is here and it's time to get your home ready for friends and family to celebrate. We've got all the perfect home decor ideas too. From Christmas garlands, decorative wreaths and festive furnishings, it's easy to give your home a seasonal spruce. And it wouldn't be Christmas without some Christmas biscuits, including an adorable (and delicious) gingerbread house to really wow our guests. 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.

Looking past our amateur decorating job we were still disappointed with how this house looks. The icing pen colours and sweets looked different to how they appeared on the box - especially the orange icing - and the gingerbread in the box was much darker. We thought even professional bakers might get fed up with building this gingerbread house, though. You're instructed to hold the house pieces together in place for 15 minutes on several occasions, which we think takes some of the fun out of the activity.

The gingerbread houses we found easiest to build were those that came with a base piece included. These often have holes baked into them, which the wall pieces of your house should slot into neatly. In the box you'll find a selection of Cadbury chocolate bars. We were surprised that none of the chocolate came pre-cut into shape, which means you'll need to cut several pieces out of the house yourself using the whole bars. The decoration didn't disappoint, either. We found it fun and easy with plenty of fun grooves baked into the walls and roof of the house to help guide you.