Delicious Reads: Pretty in Print: Haunted Gingerbread Houses

To go along with any fun Halloween read, we thought it would be fun to create a few haunted houses of our own. Haunted gingerbread houses are such a fun activity to do during the month of Halloween

and they are the perfect craft to go along with Shirley Jackson's classic novel.

It would be fun to make a few of these haunted gingerbread houses before your book club meeting or Halloween party and use them as decor.

It would also be fun to mix up the structure of your book club and make these houses while you discuss the book, so every member can create their own haunted halloween manor. Or it would be a fun activity to do with your kids to celebrate the halloween season, who says decorating gingerbread houses only has to happen once a year at Christmas?!

There are quite a few kits available, I found different kits at Dan's grocery store,

Walmart, Micheal's Craft Store and there are dozens of different kits available online.

The two kits that I bought to try out were purchased from Walmart. Another great kit is the Trader Joe's Haunted House Kit for only $7.99.

This first kit is made by Wilton and comes preassembled. The pros of this kit are the house is a nice

large size and having it preassembled is pretty convenient. The only con is the glue/icing

they used to connect the pieces was fairly weak and you have to be careful when transporting

the box home since the house breaks pretty easily, as mine did... Those issues were

easily remedied with the help of a glue gun.

This second kit is also made by Wilton. The main pro of this kit

is you get 5 different houses, pretty much for the same price as the large, preassembled house. This makes it a nice and convenient option if you wanted to created these houses during your book club meeting and have a house for each member. They don't come preassembled which made it easier to transport home. Putting them together is really simple, we used a hot glue gun to make sure they were really stable. But this did take about an extra half hour, so if you go with this kit, I would suggest assembling them before hand. The houses in this kit are pretty small, which could be viewed as a pro since they didn't take as long to decorate or it could be a con if you really wanted to get detailed in your decor.

I got a few other items to make sure we had plenty of options when we were designing our haunted mansions. Everything I got for this craft was purchased from Walmart, it's so nice to have a craft that can be a one stop shop!

Suggestions for extra decorations:

- Candy corn

- Candy pumpkins

- Halloween Sixlets or M&M's

- Extra frosting (very important since the kits don't ever give you enough)

- Licorice

- Black and Orange Gum Drops

- Spider rings

- Sunflower seeds

- Seasonal cupcake toppers (found in the seasonal aisle)

These are the cupcake toppers, all made by Wilton and all purchased from Walmart. Aren't they adorable?! I have a secret to tell you, whenever I need to decorate cupcakes, cakes, gingerbread houses or any other baked good, I always head to Walmart, they have the best selection of Wilton products and always have such fun and unique seasonal decor. Without a doubt, whenever I bring a platter of festively styled cupcakes to a gathering, I always get asked where I found the fun decorations... and now you all know, Walmart!

I enlisted the help of my adorable nieces and nephew to help me decorate our village full of Haunted Hill Houses.

And here are how all our haunted houses turned out!

I added a graveyard to my house using the Wilton cupcake toppers. I wrote the names of the four main characters from the Haunting of Hill House on the tombstones.