Monday, December 10, 2012

Allergy-Free Gingerbread Houses and Cookies

by Kelley Lindberg


It’s rapidly becoming the time of year when gingerbread houses and gingerbread men (and their assorted wives, children, neighbors, dogs, and lawn furnishings) make their appearance. Traditional gingerbread recipes are full of common allergens, so I updated my list from last year of allergy-safe recipes for those days when you have entirely way too much creative energy and time on your hands. (Yeah, right. We can all hope.)

Allergy-Free Gingerbread House Kit from Sensitve Sweets
If you’re in the mood to go all Habitat for Gingerbread Humanity on your family, here are a few places to jumpstart your allergy-free baking frenzy:
And if you don’t have time for baking, but still feel compelled to glue candy to a house (and who doesn’t?), here are a couple of fantastic no-bake options:
  • The Candy Cottage has a snap-together plastic gingerbread house that lets you add your favorite icing and candy without the time-consuming baking. Nice! You can even wash off the decorations and use it again next year. Many thanks to Michelle Fogg (UFAN’s fearless president) for finding this one.
  • Sensitive Sweets has an Allergy-free Gingerbread House Kit that uses pre-baked gingerbread pieces, and you can order it with or without allergy-free candy from Surf Sweets. The kit is free from nuts, gluten, soy, egg, and dairy. Cool, hunh?
Looking for safe candy to use for decorations? Depending on your allergens (check all labels for ingredients), try Necco wafers, Chex cereal or Frosted mini-wheats for roofing, Smarties (I like to stack them, wrappers and all, to look like firewood or logs on a gingerbread train car), Dum-Dums, Spangler’s candy canes, Bob’s Sweet Stripes Soft Mint Candies (red & white peppermints), Bakers & Chefs Starlight Mints, Skittles, Starburst, your favorite safe fruit snacks and fruit roll-ups, Haribo gummy bears, Jolly Ranchers, Hot Tamales, Mike & Ikes, Dots, Life Savers, rock candy, candy sticks (those swirly candy sticks that they used to sell in general stores – maybe the ones at Cracker Barrel are safe?), or sticks of safe chewing gum.
 
Enjoy your new Home Sweet Gingerbread Home!

3 comments:

herwray4martin said...

Sam's Club is selling a gingerbread train station kit which is milk, egg and nut free for about $10. I was happy to see a safe option for our son!

Kelley J. P. Lindberg said...

That's wonderful! I'm going to add it to the original post so everyone sees it. Thanks!

The Cookie Crave said...

Thankyou for sharing such nice post.

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