My sister had seen pictures of these and wanted to make something from scratch. We looked at some pictures and watched a video and then just went for it. The results were pretty impressive considering we were mostly just winging it. It did have a pretty bad crack in the roof and an overall lean after a night in the fridge but it was always meant to be a short term structure so I’m still calling it a creative win.
Final Product
The basic building blocks were pretzel sticks, summer sausage rolls and hard cheese with whipped cream cheese mixed with dill piped on to hold it all together. The cream cheese mortar was way more effective than I thought it would be. We went for a rectangular 1:1:2 shape with your basic log cabin overlap on the corners with pretzel ‘logs’ alternating with cheese and sausage ‘logs’. Also used some additional pretzels for interior support.
The walls were pretty easy, the roof proved more challenging. Our first attempt to create pretzel trusses with cheese supports fell under the weight of the cracker tiles. We decided to simplify and just use the cream cheese glue to hold the cracker tiles together in a pretty steep slope. This ended up working with a little bread heel (that no one in my house eats anyway) to fill in the ends. The front side got a little cream cheese and olive wreath and the backside got some shaker cracker shingles.
Once the structure was complete we got to the fun part, decorating. We had a mustard path with olive lining, olive, pickle and sausage roll end trees. Grated parmesan snow. A olive roof cap, more trees made from rosemary and sausage ends and a snowman made from cream cheese. The snowman had a cheese nose, black pepper eyes, clove arms, a olive hat and a rosemary leaf scarf. A little star anise over the door gave a festive touch.
The final product went in the fridge to firm up while we waited for the windows, dried orange slices, to come out of the oven. Our chalet had some flaws but it was a fun way to spend some time on Christmas Eve even though we couldn’t bring ourselves to eat it. (We had too many leftover building materials to eat anyway).
