I've never before purchased any of Trader Joe's food-building kits: gingerbread house, haunted house, etc. This one, though, struck me as such a silly idea that it might be fun for Nina and me to tackle after dinner one night.
It wasn't.
The three bags of colored frosting included are damnably difficult to work with. If you cut the nozzle off close enough to the end to get a fine stream (as would be required to pull off any of the intricate designs so tantalizingly depicted on the box), the amount of pressure required to squeeze the stuff out literally blows a hole in the bag. How do we know this? Trust us--we know.
So instead you're forced to cut the nozzle with a much wider hole just to be able to get the frosting to come out, but the result is such a crudely broad tool that it's difficult to work with.
Here were my best--yet still pathetic--efforts:
And Nina's:
Now, I'll admit that since the day that we made these, I've seen maybe ten people post photos of their own creations on Twitter that were clearly superior to ours, though still nothing like the box shows. And, in the "YMMV" category, I'll note that many of these contributors expressed what fun they had making them. Us, not so much.
If the resulting cookies tasted good, all this could be forgiven. But they don't. They're sad, dreary, lifeless cookies. The white ones are below-mediocre sugar cookies. The chocolate ones are like eating Oreos without the cream filling.
And the packaging! Egads! I'm not usually too picky on this subject, but the amount of plastic that you have to throw away is unconscionable.
Will I buy it again?
No. It's an utter failure.
