Cloverdale Magazine
Cloverdale Magazine is published monthly by Graphic Zone Design and Printing.
The magazine has been serving advertisers and readers in Cloverdale for more than a decade. It is delivered to 20,000 homes and businesses via Canada Post and store drops.
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Sweet kid's project
This month's project is a log home and as you can see its made of Pirouline sticks and a few other things edible. I did this with my daughter as a fun little project. We had done the gingerbread house every previous year and I was a little bored with gingerbread stuff. The first thing we did was find a solid base. I used a tile left over from my floor, but a cutting board or a piece of plywood will do. I should have used a piece of wax paper or some tin foil because the icing is hard to get off once its dry. The icing/glue is easy to make -- all you need is 4 cups (one litre) icing sugar, 1/2 tsp (2 ML) cream of tartar and 3 egg whites in a big bowl and you just use your hand mixer for about 10 minutes and its ready. It makes a fair bit (more than I needed). I found our mix was a little runny, so I added a little more icing sugar. You can use a decorating bag or you can use a freezer bag and cut a little hole in the corner so you have an easy way of dispensing the icing. I bought some food colouring because I was going to make brown icing, (mix red and green) to glue my pieces together. I wasn't really sure if the kids would eat brown icing so I left it white. It still looks good. We started out by gluing the first row down to the base and then carefully glued each row. We didn't lay the sticks over the corners because it left a big gap in between the sticks and made the house much smaller, so we butted them against each other. The icing dried pretty fast, but just to be safe we left the walls overnight before we did the roof. Figuring out the roof wasnt that hard, but it did pose one problem. How do you get it to stay up while it dries? The solution was to put Biscotti cookies on top of the top stick and then glue the roof sticks together. The Biscotti (still in the plastic wrapper) held the roof up until it hardened. Then I removed them and added vertical sticks to finish the look. I then glued a mini Kit Kat for the front door and four Oreo cookies to two shortened sticks and glued a Biscotti cookie on top of the sticks to make the wagon. For the snow I thought I might just use some icing sugar in a sifter, but then I saw the shredded coconut. I thought that was better until I sprinkled it on the roof. It slid right off. I then got some crystal cane sugar and mixed it with a little hot water and painted the roof with it so my semi-sweet shredded coconut would stick to the roof. That's it, it's done. This was a fun project! It was a little harder and more expensive (about $25) than the store bought gingerbread house at $9.99, but it was different and that's what I was after. If you want a neat Christmas project for your kids, get them a gingerbread house -- they are easy to put together and the kids love it. If your children are a little older and/or patient then try building this log house. Here is the gingerbread house my daughter and her friends did themselves. It was great and it kept them out of my hair for hours. Remember there is no right or wrong way of doing these projects. Just have fun. Happy Building.
