Every time I wait in line at the grocery store, I can’t help but glance at the magazines beside the cashier, especially during the holiday season. The cover images are so seductive, with perfectly browned turkeys or baked confectionary creations. On an annual basis, without fail, I have a moment of inspiration (or perhaps a complete lack of cognitive functioning) where I actually believe that I can recreate one of those culinary masterpieces. Most recently, I fell victim to the allure of a picture-perfect snow-covered gingerbread house.

Before I even paid for the magazine, I was imagining my boys, 7 and 8, laughing and giggling as we built an edible holiday homestead together. After all, it involves arts and crafts of sorts, baking, and working with candy. What’s not to love?

I laid out the bowls, ingredients, and measuring cups (maybe this could double as a math lesson too – score one for mommy!), pre-heated the oven, and positioned the magazine’s photo beside us for inspiration. However, the boys immediately started playing a pretend game of war; placing the metal bowls on their heads and using the spatulas as weapons. After a quick rinse, the bowls were back on the counter and the kids started mixing ingredients. Much to their delight, we learned that amateur bakers who attempt to cream butter with a mixer held at a right angle can send sugarcoated balls of butter flying a surprising distance in almost any and every direction. With the batter (finally) mixed and the dough set, our baking troops began endless bickering about who would use the rolling pin first – yes, there was an actual fight over baking utensils!

To my surprise, baking offered newfound wisdom: there is a fine art to making perfectly shaped gingerbread pieces. It turns out the baking time needs to be far more exact than the suggested 6-15 minute range, and that size does in fact matter (in this case anyway). If your goal is to achieve evenly baked pieces, you’ll need one cookie sheet for large walls and roof shapes, one for smaller walls, and yet another for small pieces like chimney sides and window shutters. Well, this required one more cookie sheet than I owned. Also, don’t reach for that nasty old warped cookie sheet thinking that the parchment paper will keep your dough clean. I learned the hard way that warped baking sheets make for warped gingerbread walls, which, of course, don’t support a roof. Oops!

The disappointment over misshaped pieces lacking any hope of fitting together is not an ideal way to teach geometry (loose one score for mommy…dang). It’s instead a moment where your children look at you totally perplexed and expect you, the holiday-focused Super Mom, to fix the unfixable. Double-oops. But I wasn’t throwing in the towel just yet.

I headed back to the grocery store and purchased a pre-baked gingerbread house kit where all you had to do is decorate! Nevertheless, I didn’t anticipate how many pieces would be broken by the time we got home and unwrapped the horrendous childproof packaging. We assembled the broken pieces in a jigsaw puzzle fashion and tried to glue them back together using icing; this failed miserably.

I decided desperate times called for desperate measures. I Googled ‘easy-to-make gingerbread houses’ and discovered graham cracker cookies are the new gingerbread. To create a strong frame for the house, you can simply glue the pieces to a tissue box! Finally, avoid sibling squabbles by allowing each child to decorate his/her own gingerbread house.

The timing of my children’s sugar-induced highs matched my plummeting patience for picking candy off the floor, the walls, and out of my hair. But, at least we had finally made gingerbread houses! I would like to brag that our structures were beautiful, though the best that I can suggest is that they showed our unique creativity. Our designs bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the scrunched up magazine page that had mysteriously found its way to the floor and then stuck itself to the bottom of my shoe.

Next year, I promise to attempt better self-control while standing in the checkout line. I plan to stare at a mobile phone photo of my now decimated kitchen until the cashier asks for my money.