We built a house, a rice crispy house

Now that I  notice cake and baking-related things a little bit more than I used to (small understatement there, you understand) I couldn't help but notice all the mentions of gingerbread houses at this time of year.  I felt it was possibly a bit beyond me, what with the working and kids and their activities and so forth, so picked up a box kit for a rice crispy house at a local supermarket.  We waited for a suitable afternoon and all got down to the important business of house-building...

 The kit gave you all the ingredients in the right quantities, so we just followed the instructions.

They didn't mention what a mess the marshmallow made of your pots though - this looks like it's gonna take some serious elbow grease to wash!

After pressing the prepared mix into the mould, and putting it in the fridge for the required time, we had our house components.  A little bit of icing was used as the mortar, and the house was ready to be decorated! Both girls were given a side each, some extra mini Smarties and relevant sized sweets and got to it.

The line sprinkles were meant to look like sparkly snow, but kinda got stuck along the way, and all over the work area.

This was mine and Mini-1's side, fairly neat and straight.  We tried to co-ordinate our colours so they made lines along the roof panel.  It sorta worked, right?

And here is Mini-2's side.  She used some of the other sweets and went for a different pattern with her mini Smarties.  

And here's a lovely line-up of all the treats we had available to eat on Christmas day itself, made by our fair hands...

Our twin birthday girls

Both Mini-1 and Mini-2 have twins.  I may have mentioned that before.  Or not.  But I feel that I have, hmmm... Anyway, these other children aren't technically our twins, you understand, but rather children born to different mothers on the same day in the same ward of the same hospital with whom we are good friends.

So anyway, to cut what could be an unnecessarily long story short, we were going to see Mini-1's twin on their actual birthday (which always falls within the Christmas school holidays, boo hiss) for a playdate at our place - woo hoo!!!  

And so to the cake, of course.  Again, Mini-1 was particular in her desires and still declared green to be her favourite colour (that'll be 3 years now, gosh), whereas her twin said pink and white.  I had bought a number 8 shaped cake maker and fully intended to use that somehow.  Well, it was going to be 2 and a half years until I'd next get the chance, wasn't it?!

It looked good on the pack, right?

 But it was quite tricky to assemble.  The batter was tinted pink, as per the twin's request.

Oooh, it worked!!  But it proved quite tricky to take off the backing sheet, so I didn't dare try to slice and fill it with jam.  I figured that the kids would eat it regardless, and not be too bothered about the lack of a middle layer/filling.

We bought 5 bags of Smarties in order to have enough to make the stripes I wanted across the top of the cake.  You would think that nearly 3/4 of a kilogram of coloured choc sweeties would be plenty, right?  Wrong.  After the girls separated out all the colours, there were hardly any orange ones and it didn't look like there were going to be enough to do the lines really close together - as I had planned.  I had no intention of going out and buying more Smarties (because I knew we'd need to eat all the leftovers, and I really, really prefer M&M's) so had to re-think the spacing between the lines.

Et voila, we see the final result!  As it happened, I could probably have placed the lines a little closer together (and perhaps, if you're being a touch unkind, a little straighter, but who's checking with a ruler?) because there were a fair few leftovers.  But not really that many in the right colours.

The girls were tremendously impressed, as 8 year olds faced with cake and candy are wont to be.  

Here we see them blowing out the candles together.

 Then posing separately for the cutting - happy birthday gorgeous girls!!!