A gingerbread wonderland
posted in Chinese culture, Crafts, Food, Gingerbread, Holidays and Festivals, OmegaDad, OmegaDotter |This year, OmegaDad made sure to have some little gingerbread houses for OmegaDotter to do all by herself, because she gets tired of having to follow daddy’s directions. She wants to let her creativity reign; he wants to rein in her creativity (in this case only!), because he always has A Vision for his holiday gingerbread creation. Anyway, he made four tiny little gingerbread cottages for the dotter to decorate, while he immersed himself in his pagoda-on-the-hills creation.
I helped the dotter, but only as directed. What she said, went. So here’s the overall view from above:
You have four gingerbread cottages with green and red tiling; a car on the road, two pine trees (one decorated), a little pond, and Santa and an elf making snow angels. You can’t see them, but each of the cottages has a wreath made of chewing gum. Chewed chewing gum.
This is a close-up from the side of the front scene, in which you can see the decorated tree much better, plus the candy-cane fencing:
Santa, being so eager to run out and make snow angels, had dropped his bag off at the entry to the village:
While all this was going on, OmegaDad was sculpting his Santa of fondant:
Santa was going to be skiing down one of the hills, so he had to be on skis.
The finished product has ski poles, and the hands are wrapped around the ski poles, which is why Santa is handless in these pics.
So here is the grand product, the pagoda on the hill. Note there are no ninjas. I do not know what happened to the planned-upon ninjas, they just sort of vanished. Maybe they are so sneaky that they are invisible, but they’re really there?! Note the lovely, smooth, glass-like lake. See Santa skiing downhill? He was originally up higher, but…he skied further down the hill, and OmegaDad decided that this was the spot Santa needed to be at.
The night scene:
In the back of the pagoda hill, there is another tree and another panda:
A close-up of the pagoda and its Christmas tree:
The pagoda, alas, started tilting early on. At this point, it is the Leaning Pagoda of Alaska, and OmegaDad and I figure that sometime soon, when the dotter is bouncing around, it will fall and go boom.
You might think this is a very sparse, little decorated gingerbread scene, and thus not very much work. I assure you, it was a lot of work. Three huge batches of rice krispie treats. Many, many, many batches of fondant and royal icing. The pagoda itself is made of stacked circles of rice krispie treats with gingerbread roofs made by coating the outside of pot-pie tins with carefully draped gingerbread. The trees are made of fondant, rolled out, cut into graduated circles, then carefully given points by pressing with the pointy part of a heart-shaped cookie cutter. And on and on. OmegaDad’s creations are always fun, and always a lot of work, and always (though it may not seem like it) a lot of work. Please applaud his project!
(I note that, even after lo these many gingerbread projects being featured on the blog, I did not have a “Gingerbread” category. That has been rectified.)
