Building and decorating a gingerbread house is a fun family activity to do during the holiday season, but constructing a gingerbread house from scratch isn’t easy! The Costco Create A Treat Pre-Built Gingerbread Mansion Kit looks like a promising product for families who want to enjoy decorating a gingerbread house without having to go through the entire construction process. Does this kit deliver on the most fun parts of making a gingerbread house and eliminate the hard and frustrating parts?
Picking up the Create A Treat Pre-Built Gingerbread House Kit from Costco was my husband’s idea. We’re really busy with our new baby, so I wasn’t 100% sold on the idea of sitting down and building a gingerbread house. Luckily for me, Sean did all the building. Spoiler alert – he did not enjoy his experience!
Other festive products from Costco are the Kit Kat Cabin & Hut Building Kit, Kirkland Signature Gingerbread Decorating Kit, Shasha Gingerbread Cookies, Kirkland Signature Ginger Cookies, Kirkland Signature Raspberry Crumble Cookies, Kirkland Signature Red Velvet Cheesecake and the Kirkland Signature Chocolate Yule Log.
Location in Store
This kit is located in the Christmas seasonal aisle at Costco. The item number is 1533852.
Taste
Taste-wise, the gingerbread itself is pretty much exactly what you would expect – a hard, too sweet and artificial/processed-tasting attempt at a gingerbread cookie. The icing is pure sugar, so you might as well just grab a bag of sugar and eat it with a spoon.
The most edible candy would be the jelly/gummy candies with sugar on them, but even those aren’t great. I definitely wouldn’t recommend eating this gingerbread house (especially since it will probably sit out for a few weeks before you would even want to do that).
With all of this being said, I don’t think the shortcomings in the taste department are a big deal; all of these components are designed to be fun building materials first and food second.
Cost
The price of the kit has increased by five dollars from 2018 and now costs $14.99 Canadian. In 2018 it cost $9.99 Canadian (though it was called a house then and now it’s called a mansion!). I still think that’s a pretty awesome price. You get a kit full of everything you possibly could need to build and decorate your gingerbread house, and the house itself is already built!
Convenience
The Costco Create A Treat Pre-Built Gingerbread Mansion Kit comes with everything you need to create a cute-looking gingerbread house. You get enough decorating supplies that you should be fine to finish as long as you don’t waste anything and you plan ahead. You might want to think about how you’re going to use your candy before you get started as there isn’t a ton of extra. The red and green icing tubes are also a bit on the small side. We only had enough green icing to do one tree (though we probably could have used less if we were more careful).
This kit could definitely occupy a child or a group of children for at least a couple of hours. Even as an adult I can honestly say that it was super fun to do with my husband when we did it together back in 2018 (although there were a few curse words dropped when icing got smeared or we had to crawl around the kitchen floor looking for candy that had fallen off the table and disappeared). The 2022 version didn’t work out quite as well though!
Sean had a really frustrating building experience with the mansion kit this year. The icing wouldn’t hold the roof gable in place. This was partly because there was a big gap between the front part of the roof gable and the support pieces. If it had fit together properly, it might have worked better. He said next time he would just skip the gable roof since that kind of started things off on the wrong foot. The roof pieces kept sliding off and made a mess of the house, plus he was frustrated before he even really started decorating. Another complaint is that the big bag of icing is for decorating as well as building. This can be a problem when you’re trying to do finer detail work with a tip that’s cut for piping out larger pieces of icing for gluing pieces together.
The kit looks promising, but you’re going to be frustrated and disappointed if you want to create a beautiful gingerbread house like the one on the box – at least unless you’re more talented than Sean is! I would say this kit is fine for kids to play around with, but the issues with the roof as well as the fact that the white icing just didn’t seem quite sticky enough (some of our candy kept falling off) are big disappointments. Overall I’d say the kit half wins in the convenience department. You get a decent pre-built house along with gingerbread people, trees, icing and candy, so all the pieces are there. You don’t need to bake or mix icing or do much prep work at all. The decorating experience just isn’t very much fun when your house falls apart as you’re working on it.
Nutrition
Calories
Apparently, the whole gingerbread house kit contains about 6,600 calories. I’ll stick to eating the Costco Kirkland Signature Ginger Cookies and use my house as a decoration only.
Kids will definitely try bits and pieces of the candy, but that’s what being a kid is about! Hopefully nobody chips their teeth on some of the rock-hard candies.
Ingredients
None of the ingredients listed are healthy. Sugar is listed multiple times. I’d much rather make my own gingerbread house from scratch than eat any of this, but that also takes a lot of skill, talent and time!
The ingredients list contains egg, milk and wheat and the kit may contain soybeans as well.
Scoring
Taste: 1/10
Cost: 9/10
Convenience: 5/10
Nutrition: 0/10
Overall
Walk on by!
Have you made this gingerbread house kit from Costco? How easy did you find it?
Please note that this review was not paid for or sponsored by any third party. This product was purchased by Costcuisine for the purpose of producing this review. The opinions in this review are strictly those of Costcuisine. Costcuisine is not affiliated with Costco or any of its suppliers. In the event that Costcuisine receives compensation for a post from the manufacturer of a product or some other third party, the arrangement will be clearly disclosed (including where the manufacturer of a product provides Costcuisine with a free.
This house does come pre built, however it lacks enough frosting for the whole house to be decorated. The frosting is also very runny and does not hold well. It is less mess in one sense but really making a gingerbread house is not that bad for a mess.
Las paredes de la mansión vinieron empujadas para adentro.
Hey there! We received this as a gift for our toddler and came across your post when I looked it up. Just wanted to share that I really enjoyed reading your review – detailed and informative as well as entertaining! Very well-written! I will definitely be checking out your other posts! Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas to you as well!