Winter Festival - Gingerbread House

The object of this contest is to build a real life Gingerbread House using edible materials! This is not a digital contest, so no digital entries. You can't eat pixels.


Rules

1. Your Gingerbread House must be built by using any type of food. You are not required to use gingerbread. You are free to use crackers, other types of bread, chocolate, candy, etc. However, you must use real food in this contest! The small use of non food items (like toothpicks) are allowed to improve the structural integrity of your submission. They must be used sparingly though and it must be obvious that your submission consists of actual edible materials.

2. When building your Gingerbread House, you must take at least 3 pictures of the process with your Username and "2025 Winter Festival" physically visible. Here is an example of how this should look:


You do not need to post them in a grid like this. I just did this to save space.

Here is a link to last year's contest for reference:
2024 Winter Festival - Build a Gingerbread House

3. When you are finished with your entry, come back to this thread and post it here.

A Player Guide on How to Upload Images

4. You must create your entry on your own! You cannot have someone else build your Gingerbread House for you, although having some assistance is perfectly fine and reasonable. All submissions must also be brand new; you cannot use previous submissions. Lastly, please try and come up with your own unique designs. Obviously, using a kit is okay to do and those will probably be similar because kits are generally universal. What I am referring to would be copying someone else's previous design from a past contest and redoing it as your own; some of you have come up with some pretty awesome unique designs in the past!

If you have never created a Gingerbread House before, here are some handy tutorials to get you started:

Link 1 (Offsite)

5. All submissions must look like they required some measurable amount of effort in order to qualify for prizes. For example, stacking two slices of bread together is not going to qualify.

6. Please do not reserve posts. Only post when you are ready to submit an entry. If your entry is still ongoing, you may post early with the progress that you currently have and edit your post as you finish.

7. Please do not ping me unless you have a specific question or concern that I need to address. Thank you.

8. The due date for submitting your entry is by the end time of Forum Games for the Winter Festival. Please refer to the eventual Overview thread for this final date. The Overview thread will be posted once the Winter Festival officially begins.


Prizes

All submissions will be judged by the Admins. We will announce winners for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places. Everyone who submits a valid entry will be awarded very nice participation prizes as well as the Title: Gingerbread Architect.

All non-winning Participants will be entered into a drawing where 3 Lucky Winners will win 2,000, 1,000, and 500 Diamonds, respectively.

Above all else, be creative and have fun! These contests are just meant to be fun. =)

All prizes are subject to change. The list below serves as approximation of what to expect.

1st Place Winner(s)
Prize(s): 2,000 Diamonds, Free Stable, [Peerless Avatar Token] x1, 3-Visible Winter Festival Themed Pet of Choice (2-Vis if Majestic) x2, [Philter of Trait Disruption] x5


GoldGryphon


2nd Place Winner(s)
Prize(s): 1,000 Diamonds, Free Stable, [Peerless Avatar Token] x1, 3-Visible Winter Festival Themed Pet of Choice (2-Vis if Majestic), [Philter of Trait Disruption] x3


Faeyla



Falkinsey


3rd Place Winner(s)
Prize(s): 500 Diamonds, Free Stable, [Peerless Avatar Token] x1, 3-Visible Winter Festival Themed Pet of Choice (2-Vis if Majestic), [Philter of Trait Disruption] x1


Achz



AliceHearts



Berrydog


All Participants
Prize(s): Title: Gingerbread Architect, [Fabled Frost Essence] x2, [Premium Ice Water] x3, [Box of Ice Sculpting Supplies] x1, [Box of Ice Sculpting Agents] x3, [Legendary Avatar Item (Winter - Retired)] x1, [Avatar Item (Winter - Retired)] x3, [Frost Token] x1,000


1st Place Raffle Winner
Winner: Calliopeace
Prize: 2,000

2nd Place Raffle Winner
Winner: Sakurachan
Prize: 1,000

3rd Place Raffle Winner
Winner: Insanesanity
Prize: 500

So, I was going to keep it very simple this year due to time constraints, but then my coworkers talked me into making something for our department for the gingerbread house contest at work. I had found some mini gingerbread house cookie cutters I had wanted to try out. A nice tree in the middle. Only three days to get it done, so minimal chance to go down the rabbit hole of just add one more thing. Easy! Yeah...


Dough made and ready to chill in the fridge.


Using cookie cutters is so much nicer than my usual handmade templets. Even tried out my wood texture mold on one of the houses.


Melted some peppermint candies and poured them in for window. Had to make sure I kept all of the correct house pieces together since there were four slightly different gingerbread houses. And made some foiled cardboard bases for each house. Since I was going to have to transport everything to work, I needed to make it as modular as possible.


Houses all decorated and assembled. Man assembling mini houses is so much easier! The pieces are so light weight that the royal icing has no problem holding everything on its own. No need for cans or standing holding things until it dried.


Lots of tree pieces


Tree pieces decorated with green sanding sugar and round candies. Starting to assemble.

While the pieces looked lovely, they needed to be tied together somehow...down the rabbit hole I went! I was so focused on getting things done, I didn't take many picures.

Made an area around the tree. Originally was supposed to be a walking area, but the colors ended up looking more like an ice skating rink. Either works! Now working on making paths from the houses.


Everything completed and in place.


Everything made the trip to work! Used parchment paper to make it look more like snow.
The idea was to have each house be unique with its own unique path, but they all come together under the tree.

Ok.. I know I said I'd never do this again, but I came up with a better alternative and it worked out! Not to mention I will be eating it too.. er.. already started to eat on it. I used three different kinds of pretzels, spinach dip, crackers, and edible sprinkly decorations. (Was originally gonna use saltines but the whole grain crackers fit better.)


I bit off part of the ends to make it easier to fit together. I would do a few layers then put it in the freezer so that it would solidify.

I used crunched up pretzels with the spinach dip to make mortar.

I hope this works, I'm on mobile

Getting all the ingredients together (I was an air-brain and didn't realize that I bought a pre-built house instead of a kit, should probably get more sleep).


Put icing on windows, roof, and made wreaths. Added lemon drops to windows and red and green candies to the wreaths.


Added a pink door, green spice drop bushes, white spice drop snow drifts on top of the roof, white sparkly edible glitter, and blue icicles (which were really stubborn but I figured out a technique to make them look cool - in my opinion of course).


Finished with a red chimney and my fiance adding a little snowman to live in the gingerbread house. Ain't he cute?


Not the prettiest house out there, but I had fun and I like how it came out. Also love the little snowman my fiance made. <3

Gingerbread Sylesties






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Instead of making a building, I decided to make some gingerbread animals from Sylestia!
After doing some holiday cookie baking with my family, I had gingerbread cookies of a variety of shapes, including some fun creatures:



I started with a horned qitari:



Next was a little bulbori:





I added a Faelora and a Lunemara:





Finally, a Zolnixi:



The finished set (also shown at the top):

Materials:
Decorating the walls:
Finishing touches:

Done!
Not a lot of in progress pictures because my hands were covered in icing for most of it lol, but I managed to get the requisite three photos.

started with the icing

then we opend the cookies

and started asebeling

and my son realy realy wanted to help decorate, so i gave him 2 tree's to make





this image comes from discord so chance is it will poof
there was a very hungry trashpanda, how ended up eating the tree's


so we kept on working


he thouth he could clame the hous, or tree's i made or the snowman for desert XD but i told him no becaus i still needed pics.







so i realy wonder that now that i'm finist, if the hous will last another day X'D (it got devowerd in the 2 days after ^^' )

I don't know what kind of icing I needed to buy, but it wasn't the kind I got...