Graham Cracker House Winter Wonderland

This shop to create a Winter Wonderland Graham Cracker House has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #HoneyMaidHouse #CollectiveBias

We have a food allergy in this household. It’s been around for a couple of years and it changed our approach to a lot of recipes and even our many celebrations from birthdays to holidays. My youngest daughter is allergic to Red Dye 40, a common artificial dye found in many food products, lotions, and even toothpaste. When she comes in contact with it, either ingesting it, or even just skin contact, she breaks out in hives. We’ve found that just a little exposure doesn’t usually do more than a slight red tinge to her mouth area, too much will bring on the hives and make her extremely uncomfortable for a few days. Oh, and it’s probably a good thing to mention, that red dye is found in her allergy medication, so we have to be even more diligent in our search to locate the dye free medication for her.

Around the holidays we have a lot of traditions. One of them is building gingerbread houses. This year we thought we’d take a little bit different approach and go with something a bit more healthy, so we decided to make Honey Maid Graham Cracker Houses! With my daughter’s allergy to red dye it means there are a lot of different candies she can’t have. Most anything candy coated in bright colors or anything fruity flavored is out. This includes pretty much all of the traditional edible house decorations. Gumdrops, licorice, candy coated chocolate, and the list goes on.

At first we were at a loss for what to buy, then I changed my mindset. Let’s look for healthier options, and we came up with a huge collection of items the kids could use to decorate their house! Check out this spread, and that doesn’t even include my idea for nuts!

And this is where it begins. How to make a healthier, artificial dye free, Honey Maid graham cracker house.

1. Gather all of your supplies. You’ll need Honey Maid graham crackers, pretzels in different shapes, dried fruit such as raisins, dried blueberries, and dried cranberries, dye free cereals, yogurt or chocolate covered dried fruit, coconut, white chocolate chips, peanut butter, and Greek yogurt.  Pick and choose what works for you, like I mentioned you can add in chopped nuts and many other cereals or dried fruits. There are a lot of options out there!
2. Next create your base. I took a piece of cardboard and wrapped it in parchment paper. This made for an easy to clean up flat surface to build a graham cracker house.
3. Now cut out your Honey Maid graham cracker pieces. Plan out your house anyway you want. I went with simply two full sized walls, two square walls, and the roof was two full sized peices with one square cut in triangles for the roof support. It worked out great, but you can get fancier if you want.
4. We used peanut butter to glue our walls together. This worked okay, but it did slide quite a bit more than if we had used a frosting that hardens, such as royal icing. Depending on your needs you can decide which edible glue you’ll use to hold the sides up, but we are proof that peanut butter can work!
5. Finally decorate to your hearts content. We added coconut snow on the base, then dusted the top with powdered sugar. We were cutting down on the sugar, but didn’t think a light dusting would make too much difference. I love how the sugar looked on the dried blueberries.

And that’s how you make a Honey Maid Winter Wonderland Graham Cracker House that is artificial dye free! They can be just as cute and just as delicious as the candy filled traditional gingerbread house.

Don’t forget to pick up your ingredients for this house at Walmart. I found most everything in the same section, and you can get your Honey Maid graham crackers there too.

Do you have a tradition of decorating edible houses for the holidays? What is your fun spin on this activity? Find more inspiration for graham cracker houses at the Delicious Moments of Joy website. Share your ideas in the comments below.