well my attempt at making a gingerbread house did not go so well. i apparently lack the patience to make one. lol i bought a kit, here was how it went:

Creative lol. I would eat it.

*hugs* I, too, have felt that pain.

My little sister (who turned two in September) wanted to make a house with me. I couldnt say no to such a cute face, as it was her first gingerbread house, and you can obviously tell what happened as the photos go along. The amount of times she knocked down the house surprised me (I counted 8 times). She also wanted to say Merry (early)Christmas to you guys! Hope everyone is enjoying the fest!



(Wait for it...)

(The house disintegrated after I took the pictures xD)

Well, it's not very impressive, but here it is. We never do gingerbread houses in my family, and we don't really have bread/crackers/cake or anything like that around the house to build out of, so I had to be more creative. So what did I find? Vegetables and fruit. Healthy House!


Carrots seemed like the easiest thing to build with, so I cut several in half to give them a flat side.


Here I have them stacked. I was hoping to build it like a log cabin (brings back memories of Lincoln Logs!) but I ended up basically stacking them, which meant I couldn't build it very high.


Here I've added a roof of apples. (I later added one more in the middle.)


And here it is with the details! Banana walkway and tree, nut door and edging.


Another angle of the finished house.

As I said, not very impressive. In fact, it kind of ended up a pile of food instead of a house. But I tried, and hopefully it qualifies.

it wouldn't hold LOL


nearly complete except for roof decor.


roof decor is on!

I built a little house for my 3 year old niece. It's made out of Butterkeks (Google translator tells me "shortbread", but I don't think it's the same), Smarties and some other decor stuff like sugar pearls and gummi bears.

Here we go:


I didn't use everything. Decided to not use the zebra rolls and sugarglue... glued everything with selfmade frosting instead.


Cutted the Butterkeks in shape for the house.


Glued the pieces together with frosting made out of powdered sugar and water.


Added the roof.


Door made of a mini Butterkeks and windows made of Smarties.


Decorated the roof with some sugar pearls and added a doorknob.


Put some Smarties on top of the roof and built a little archway made of Smarties. That one was the hardest part... it broke a few times.


Glued the house on top of the platform and started building a fence.


Finally I added the archway, made a little path of frosting and put two gummi bears in front of the house.









Almost 4 hours of work with tiny pearls and mini Smarties... but totally worth it. Can't wait to give it to my niece :)

EDIT: After travelling to my sister by train I had to repair the archway twice before our christmas celebration. It broke of course ^^ But my niece was totally happy about the house. We put it under the christmas tree for her to find behind her presents and she was like "Mommy, mommy, mommy, look!" I'm definitely going to do this again next year. Maybe something bigger :)

(The images are bigger, when opened in a new window)

Finally finished mine @-@

I found these new hersheys candy bars that were caramel colored, which I instantly realized were /perfect/ for a yellow brick road. And you can't have a yellow brick road without an Emerald City! So, inspired by a twister trip to our Sylestian Oz, heres my take on the Emerald City. (Their roofs, and likely their walls, unfortunately would like not survive a twister. Poor graham cracker munchkins...)


Gathering the supplies. Despite it being a christmas color, ti was...surprisingly difficult to find green materials. I had to buy a lot of packs with multiple colors, like the candy canes and lifesavers, and for some things just blindly hope they had enough green for what I wanted to use them for. I also got some golden sugar pearls to line the road with, and some things like marshmallows for accents.


The base is an old pizza box for cleanliness and stability, but I glued a layer of graham crackers on with icing. I didn't want the pizza box to be visible under the actual city area, since it was just a support base so i ahd soemwhere to work.


One of my supplies was an edible color misting spray. I didnt think about using it until after i started laying the road down and realized that the candy bar was the same golden color as the graham crackers. I used green glitter gel to glue the sugar pearls into place along the road.


The completed road.


Starting to build up the walls. I coated them with a layer o cream cheese frosting to prep for the color misting. I found the color looked better on the frosting, and it helped the stability of the buildings as well.


In progress building one of the floors. The small shed attached to the smaller building is only one floor, but the two main buildings are both two story. I built the floors like this, then flipped them when they were dry so there was some sort of base for th next floor or the roof. (unfortunately, I did not wait long enough for this most of the time, so these floors buckled a bit.)


All buildings are stacked and coated in frosting. I decorated the shed with marshmallow bushes and lined it with glitter gel.


I made some trees out of fondant and then used some for doors and windows. i used glitter gel again to add details to the windows, and put lifesaver wreaths ont he doors.


The roof panels were not cooperating. I used m&ms and glitter gel bubbles to help cover some of the iffiness lol. I didnt get a pic, but the smaller building uses spree candies instead of m&ms.



Front view of finished city. I am including two variations, with and without a front panel for the big roof. im not really sure which version i prefer lol. It is....extremely difficult to cut graham crackers without breaking them. I kept having to go in and fill breaks with decorating icing to glue them back together lol. and I still ended up not making it quite the right size.


Sideview.

Honestly had a lot of fun with this :D Even if i wanted to through the roof out the window lol. I'm not completely happy with the roof, but this was the best option out of several i tried due to the size and shape of the buildings.

Oh boy, here we go again. Get comfy, prepare your eyeballs, maybe grab a snack, I've got so much to show you..

Gingerbread House III: "How Do Trees Work?"

This year, I decided to challenge both gravity and sanity and make an edible treehouse. We begin with the base.

Thick layers of the sturdiest cardboard I could get, and a square of foam.


I cut a square in the middle of allll the cardboard boxes to stick the foam into, and glued the layers of cardboard together. The dowel rods had to be secured well, with no wobbling, as they need to hold up the house. Duct tape fixes everything, they say. Take a good look, because this is the last time you will see anything inedible used.



Crushed cereal makes a nice bark texture. I almost gave up, since it was difficult to get the cereal to stick to anything but my hands, but pressed on in the name of creation. The last picture shows three dowel-rod-branches, but one didn't really fit well so I removed it. The fewer inedible pieces, the better. Edible extra branches are made of spaghetti sticks stuck in spaghetti tubes.


The cereal was painted with several coats of melted chocolate, both to give the trunk a nice gnarled look and to make the branches look.. branchy. It worked a lot better than I expected.


Every self-respecting tree needs branch offshoots. More spaghetti stuck into the already-chocolate-coated spaghetti.


Tree leaves. Each leaf was dipped in green chocolate and attached separately.


With the tree needing to dry for a while, I started working on the house. This year's is made from waffles. They're fairly regular in size and easy to measure by squares. Making a house that was to be fitted and balanced in a tree required precision.


Thus we reach one of the other major building components of my house: fondant. Rolled thin and cut to fit on the waffle-floor.


Had to test if the floor would stay on the tree and fit properly.


It did, so I started making the outside walls. More fondant, treated heavily with Tylose so it would dry quickly. Fondant does not like moisture, and it's very humid on this side of the continent.


The white fondant was cut into strips, to look like siding, and cemented onto the waffle-wall with royal icing.


Finished outer wall fondant coats. The bottom one is layered just like the other ones, but the camera flash makes it look like it isn't.


I didn't want all-brown waffle walls, so I made some fondant wallpaper. It's much thinner than the outside layer of fondant, and again secured with royal icing.


Beginning of house assembly. The walls were secured with melted chocolate, since it dries faster than icing.


Roof construction.


Roof completion. Stability testing.


Doors don't really make sense for a treehouse like this, so here are some entryway curtains. They're fondant too.


With the house put together (minus a back wall so you can see inside of it) it was time for furniture! I made lots of teeny things for this house; out of gum paste, fondant, or a mixture of the two.


Some placed furniture


Festive fondant decorations for the outside of the house. I made them "spiky" by cutting the fondant with scissors. It took about as much time as you're thinking it does.


Each little light was individually made and attached to black melted chocolate.



It's technically a "noodle" tree so I thought it needed.. noodles. Gum paste noodles.



Construction of items I really like. Hope I did them justice.


I redid the roof tiles. Didn't like the look of the first ones. Too many gaps.





The cardboard base obviously needed to be transformed into a magical forest floor. Done so with copious melted chocolate, oreos spun through a food processor. and a light sprinkle of green sugar.


Another angle so you can see the whole tree. It's difficult to photograph, due to its size.



I didn't want the whole base to be the same dark brown, so I made a nice grass patch out of green melted chocolate, light brown melted chocolate, and Wheaties. Wheaties, when crushed, break into nice stringy things that make for a convincing grass texture. The entire base is covered at this point.



The base needed some cute little gum paste grown things.





And what better for a grass patch than a picnic setup? The fondant blanket is inspired by a blanket I really own. When rolled thin enough, fondant acts like fabric. Delicious fabric.




I was excited to try sugarwork for the first time. I didn't have molds to pour windows in or anything, so I just poured all of it onto a pan and cut the windows out of it freehand. To get them to fit exactly, I licked them into shape. They're stuck into the window frames with melted white chocolate.
The tiny potion bottles are little fondant blobs rolled in the sugar. Had to be careful to not touch it; hot sugar hurts, but at the same time I had to be quick since it seizes up pretty fast.




Finishing up the base with some spaghetti and chocolate baby trees.





For the final part of the house, a dangling ladder of planks, I needed a durable edible string element. I found such a thing in dried celery peels, which I braided together and strung through the fondant planks. Chocolate holds them all together.



And that's it, the house is done! You can see there's nothing else holding it up but the tree itself. Astounding
.




Front views with bonus nephs. One is guarding its nest, while the other is eyeballing the cake on the picnic blanket.




Side views




Back view/inside of house

Phew! Thanks so much for looking through all of that. It took a week to build this gingerbread house, and it's one of the most awesome things I've ever made. Happy Holidays, Sylestia!!

here is my first Gingerbread House i made it from a kit i bought :)

the start


put it togeather


almost done decorating


all done :)


i had so much fun doing this :) im hoping my nephews love eating it as much as i loved making it for them to enjoy this christmas