Christmas “Gingerbread” Houses

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Gearing up for our first Christmas on an autoimmune/Paleo diet, my kids started to remember all our holiday traditions around food. I’m both flattered and frustrated when they fully expect that I’ll come up with a way to replace the foods they used to enjoy, AIP or Paleo compliant. Decorating gingerbread houses is something most kids (and teens….okay adults too!) love to do in preparation for Christmas. Although decorating them is fun, in the past I’d also feel totally disgusted with all the sugar, food colouring, etc that is typically used on the houses. Most of it would go to waste because I just couldn’t bring myself to allow my kids to eat all that crap. Being forced to get creative with ingredients has completely changed all that for us! These “gingerbread” houses we made were a HUGE hit. Not only were they so fun to make but I had absolutely no problems with my kids (and yours truly) devouring them! Here are the before and after pictures LOL!

Before….

And after….

So, how did we make these little cuties? Here’s how we did ours. You can get super creative with yours and use whatever recipes, veggies and fruit you want.

Christmas “Gingerbread” Houses (Paleo, AIP with substitutions)

To make the houses…

I used an almond flour cupcake recipe to make the actual houses. This was because they turned out a little more solid. However, you can easily use an AIP compliant cupcake/cake recipe to make these or your favourite Paleo cake recipe. I used a recipe from the Paleo Running Momma site, however, I completely left out the coconut sugar and I found it was sweet enough using just the maple syrup. You can find the recipe here. For the molds, I bought silicone molds from Michaels craft store.

For the icing…

To make the icing, I used my own recipe that’s pretty relaxed with the measurements. Here’s a rough guideline but you can play around with the ingredients to get the consistency you like.

Icing

• 1 cup coconut butter, softened but not melted
• 2-3 tablespoons coconut milk
• 2 tablespoons tapioca starch
• 1/8 teaspoon pure monk fruit (1 teaspoon raw honey for AIP)
• pureed beets, spinach, and tumeric powder for colouring

Instructions:

Soften coconut butter in microwave. Remove and add coconut milk, tapioca starch and either monk fruit or honey. Mix well. Separate icing into three bowls. Add small drops of beet juice, spinach and tumeric powder to each bowl, mixing until you get your desired colour.

For the decorations….

Here’s a list of the items we used to decorate our houses. Again, you can get creative and come up with your own!

• shredded coconut (for snow)
• blueberries
• raspberries
• blackberries
• kale
• Paleo friendly chocolate chips (omit for AIP)