This is me thinking: "Hmmm...I'd really like to make a gingerbread house...and there's a Craftster contest...what would be hard to make out of gingerbread?...I know! A Chinese pagoda!" So voila!
It's the first house I've ever made without lots of help from a nearby parent or someone. I like it and I hope I get a lot of votes!
The roofs were molded over cardboard frames I had made. I don't have pictures of them and it's kinda hard to explain, but I made four trapezoids out of cardboard, except with curvy sides, and stapled the curvy sides together to make a roof shape. Then I covered it with aluminum foil and greased it, and put the gingerbread on it.
Here's the door:
The walls were covered with gum paste, and the roof tiles were made with gum paste "snakes". There's almost four pounds of gum paste on this thing. I'm going into a diabetic coma just thinking about it. There's people:
and a pond:
There's fish in the pond that I made out of gum paste, but you can't see very well. The pond is jello and started to mold after a while, despite being brushed with whiskey (alcohol should have killed it!), so when I'm done this post I'm going to go throw it away.
Here's a bird's eye view of the roof:
and a view of the tree I made to hide a supporting candy cane.
It's made of chocolate I drizzled onto foil, with the foil bent so the branches were at an angle to each other, and cooled. Then I added more branches, unbending the foil to wider angles, and when it was all cool, I painted royal icing on it and sprinkled green sugar on the icing. The path is chocolate-peanut butter-covered rice crispies, and the grass is just green sugar. The rocks around the pond are bread crumbled up in royal icing, colored with cocoa powder. The people are ginger bread with royal icing clothes.
I used a gingerbread recipe from a gingerbread house book I got from the library, and I didn't like it very much, because it didn't stay flat. Next year I'm just sticking with the Joy of Cooking recipe.
I had so much fun making this! The kids will be on sugar high for a week, but we'll live. Next year I'll start earlier, and enter contests in my neighborhood, but this year, I'm only entering the Craftster contest. I can't wait for next year...
Update: the aftermath of the attack of the kids.
There were hammers involved. And yelling. And I karate chopped it
