Decorated Pretzel Cabins

While we were baking the gingerbread houses this year, my son said he wanted to make his "gingerbread house" out of pretzels.  The kids didn't mind if I took over the gingerbread houses, so the pretzel cabins became the family project.  

Welcome to our holiday ranch:  pretzel cabin, pretzel barn and pretzel doghouse.

The decorations:  gumballs, M&Ms, spiced gumdrops, red hots & sprinkles.

I wasn't going to have the patience for constructing the structures with pretzels & royal icing to keep it edible, so I warmed up the glue gun.  I didn't have any pattern or plans.  We just sort of winged it.  Supplies:  rod pretzels, pretzel sticks, hot glue gun & sticks, serrated knife to cut the pretzels to length. I found it was easier to cut the pretzels to shape/size once they were already glued together.  The pretzels seemed to crumble less this way.

Here are the doghouse pieces:

Finally.  Time to decorate.

I stood back, took photos and told them what a great job they were doing.

I can be crazy directive when the kids are helping me decorate cookies or a cake.  Not this project.  This was all about them.

They carefully piped and placed their candy details with the tweezers..."just like Mom".

The snowy cabin:

The barn:

At first, the kids argued over the barn.  They both wanted to decorate the largest structure and I didn't have enough rod pretzels to construct another one.  I offered to make a doghouse with the pretzel sticks- which immediately appeased my daughter.  

She wants to open a pet shop bakery one day.

Gingerbread houses have become our little family tradition over the years, but we all agreed that we liked the pretzel cabins just as much...if not more.