Christmas is only a week away! A few days ago, while down in Central, I stopped by City Super to pick up a gingerbread tree decorating kit. I thought it would be a great addition to the Christmas traditions that my family (here in Hong Kong) and I could do together. Plus, it is another great way to integrate my culture into theirs…and make me feel more at home during the holidays.
This gingerbread tree decorating kit was 100 HKD, which I thought was pretty reasonably priced. There were other decorating kits: gingerbread men, gingerbread variety cookie packs, gingerbread houses, and gingerbread villages. They were all around the 100 - 200 HKD mark. And all came with pre-made gingerbread!
Our kit came with a bunch of star-shaped gingerbread cookies, bigger ones for the base and smaller ones to be stacked. It also came with pre-made icing, some sugar baubles, and a sugar star. Besides the edibles, the kit came with some piping bags and nibs.
It was pretty self explanatory, but we basically just stacked up our tree from the biggest stars to the smallest stars. We got some icing and put a dot between each layer to secure the tree.
Then we went at it! At first, we were trying to be nice and precise, but then we decided to just drench the icing all over the tree. Either way, it still came out looking impressive and tasted like Christmas. The icing sooooo reminded me of Christmas.
After slathering icing all over our tree, we then dotted it with our sugar bobbles, sprinkled some sugar granules all over … and topped our tree with our yellow sugary star.
Our final results!
Back in the day, I remember making a few gingerbread houses with my family. I think it was my aunt who really organized it. But, my cousins, my siblings and I would gather around at my grandmother's house and decorate the gingerbread houses that my aunt had made for us.
Such wonderful memories…I hope to keep this tradition up…because who doesn't need more sugar during the holiday season!?
