Sweet Creations Good Cook Haunted Gingerbread House Review and Giveaway

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When you think of gingerbread houses you probably think Christmas, but why should only one holiday get all the fun!  Sweet Creations by Good Cook offers a Haunted House Cookie Cutter Set that allows you to make your very own spooky creation for Halloween.  As a Good Cook Expert I had the opportunity to review the house and I was so excited for the challenge! The other women in the Good Cook Expert group are amazing cooks and I always feel that they are way out of my league so I was thrilled to have some baking challenges come my way (a cupcake challenge will be posted later this week). 

My Haunted House Creation:

Instructions for Building the Haunted House:

Gingerbread
(This recipe came on the back of the box. I would recommend multiplying all of the ingredients by 1.5 because there is just enough to make the house and some other Good Cook Experts had trouble with not having enough).

Ingredients
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 large egg yolk, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups flour, plus extra for dusting
1/3 cup light brown sugar, packed
1/3 cup molasses
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking soda

Preparations:
1. Preheat oven to 325 F. 
2. Place brown sugar, molasses, cinnamon, and ginger in a large saucepan over medium low heat. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Remove from heat. Stir in baking soda. Stir in butter a tablespoon at a time, stirring well between additions. Add egg, vanilla and salt, stirring to combine.
3. Add flour, a cup at a time, stirring to combine.
4. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead until dough comes together and is no longer sticky, adding flour by the tablespoonful if necessary. Place dough in refrigerator for 2 hours or until thoroughly chilled.
5. Using parchment paper or baking mat, roll approximately 1/2 of the dough into 1/8 in thickness. Cut and stamp desired pieces using the stamping wheel to add fun details.

6. Place the parchment paper with cut out dough onto a cookie sheet. Bake for 12-18 minutes or until the edges are lightly brown. Remove from heat and pieces cool on cooling rack for about 10 minutes

7. Once cool, assemble with royal icing and decorate to your spooktacular design.

Assembling the House:
When I bake, it is really important to me that 95% or more of the finished product is edible and everything on this house, except one toothpick) is completely edible!

You will need:
Royal Icing: (Royal Icing Recipe)
Buttercream: (Buttercream Recipe)
Graham Crackers
Icing Bags and the following tips: 2, 5, and 233
Candy (candy corn, candy pumpkins, Reeses Pieces, black or chocolate licorice, mini marshmallow, and gummy worms)
Leaf shaped sprinkles
Caramel
Toothpicks
Food coloring
Patience - a lot of it!! 

Assembling the house was a real fiasco (see review below as the pieces did not all fit together).  I tried assembling it with Royal Icing and used cups to try to hold the sides up while the icing dried, but it would not work. My husband came up with the idea to stick toothpicks into cardboard and use those to hold up the sides while it dried and it worked like a charm. The roof was even trickier and since one piece was not large enough, we used strips of licorice held together with royal icing to keep it from having a big gap. 

Once the house is together, decorating it is a lot of fun. I covered the roof in buttercream and then made candy corn shingles by placing a row facing down and then alternated with a row facing up. I covered the royal icing "glue" with some purple frosting and added a caramel chimney with a tiny ghost (made of a mini marshmallow) peeking out. I then added licorice (all candies were adhered with Royal Icing) around the outline of the roof to cover the royal icing and make it look like gutters.

Rather than using the stamped designs, I decided to come up with my own for the front of the house and piped on a ghost coming out of a window with royal icing. I then made the door look like a monster face by using candy corn as teeth, filling in the mouth with purple icing, piped eyes, and then added licorice as eye brows. To add some more fun, I put Reeses Pieces in a pattered order around the outline of the house

My daughter and I decided to make the house together and she never ceases to amaze me with how creative she is. The pumpkin patch was completely her idea and everything in it (aside from the writing on the sign) was made by her.  She even used toothpicks to "carve" little faces on the pumpkins! The grass was made using tip 233 (see here for an explanation of the grass technique).  We added some brown Reeses Pieces to outline the crushed graham cracker walkway and put some gummy worms coming out of the grass. We also added some leaf-shaped sprinkles to the grass. Finally, we added some candy corn as a fence around the graham cracker crumb and candy pumpkin patch and put one side of a  toothpick into a graham cracker the other into a caramel for the pumpkin patch sign. I then piped the sign using a #2 tip. 

Haunted House Cookie Cutter Review: I have made Christmas gingerbread houses before, but have always used kits that have the precooked pieces of the house included. So, baking the house pieces was a new experience for me. The kit was very cute and included a recipe on the package. It includes cookie cutters for the front, sides, and roof of the house and also included additional stamps so the cookies can be cooked with designs right on them making decorating very easy. 

Even before cut out the roof, I could tell that there was no way the pieces were going to fit. Because of the shape of the house, each portion of the roof is a different size yet there was only one cutter. The result was two pieces that were too big, one that was right, and one that was way too small and left a big gap.  I would have liked to make one of the roof pieces a little larger but the recipe for the gingerbread on the box was exactly enough to make the pieces with no dough to spare. I would have also liked an instruction book of some kind because I really struggled to get the house together. 

There certainly is some room for improvement, but the concept is great and the cookie cutters are very well made. I love that there are stamps and that they are optional so you can choose to have a template when decorating or start with a blank canvas so to speak.  

Buy it here: You can purchase the Haunted House Cookie Cutter Set from Good Cook for $20.59. You can receive an additional 25% off any Sweet Creations Halloween product using the coupon code HAUNTED23.

Win it here: 

Please refer to Terms & Conditions as Good Cook has updated their giveaway policy.

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*I received the above mentioned product for the purpose of facilitating this review. All opinions expressed are my own.