Gingerbread house 2024

I completed a last-minute Christmas 3D project on the morning of the 24th.

 

The points of this year's creation are:
•    Making cakes on stands visible through the windows
•    Designing a house with an attic

Making Tiny Additional Parts

First, I made small parts like cakes, stands, gift boxes, wreaths, and other decorations to hang in the window. While it might have been more secure to use fondant or non-edible materials for the cakes and stands, I’m committed to using only icing and cookies as much as possible. So, the cakes and stands were made from cookie dough cut out with a straw and covered with a thin icing and white food colouring. The legs of the stand are made of spaghetti coated with icing. (I hope the gypsophila flowers in the photo help give a sense of scale!)

Attaching the stand legs was excruciatingly stressful. For the gift boxes, I coated cookies with icing and added small ribbon transfers. Since everything was made very fragile, I felt relieved when I managed to fix the cake stand and gifts vertically  on the tables made from cookies, but I ended up breaking some of them when assembling the walls. Reattaching them caused the icing to peel or tilt a little.

Other tiny parts I needed were the decoration under the awning, the sign, the wreath on the door, and the pink curtains that can be seen through the windows on the side walls.

The awnings are thin iced cookies as you see. At first, I made them in ivory and light pink, but I couldn't stand the colour combination with the dark bluish-green of the walls, so I had to redo it. After much deliberation, I decided to go with a deep purple, which was close to my younger daughter's opinion that it should be maroon.

I shaved the cookie edges into parallelograms to make them easier to attach to the walls at an angle, and to give them a slight downward slope at the bottom. The scallop edges of icing showed bare cookies, which didn’t look great, so I shaved the cookies into scalloped shapes after applying the icing.

 

Next is the tree. I baked a cone-shaped cookie and painstakingly attached tiny leaf transfers and bows. It was not that hard to make and glue the parts, but the leaves and bows were so fragile that some of them broke or came off with just a touch, which made me crazy. (Lucky me I made some extra leaves and ribbons!) Although the tree is fragile, I am happy with how it turned out this time. It looks better than trees covered with lots of shells or leaves piped with a tip.

Buiding The House
Since I am not used to working with isomalt, I decided to make two pieces with the same design for the front and back walls in case I made a mistake, and use the one that turned out well for the front. (As a result, I am glad that the window on the back side allows light to enter, making the interior more visible, which was a nice bonus.) Predictably, I made mistakes while pouring the isomalt, spilling it onto the cookies and scorching them with a lighter while trying to eliminate bubbles.

After icing all the house parts, I realized I hadn’t angled the edges for 45-degree joins. Worried about cookie crumbs ruining the isomalt windows, I decided to shave the edges with the crumb side facing downward to avoid it. After all, the dry winter air helped, as I could easily brush off any crumbs.

Once the edges were shaved, I attached decorative parts to the walls. I placed the walls on the sponge with the faces down so that they would not break, then attached the tables with cake stands inside the window. However, when I started assmembling, I noticed I was not precise enough in the size of each part...

This is a view of the inside from the top. Because of the table placed in the front clashed with the curtain attached to the right wall, the walls wouldn’t fit, so I had to shave down the table. In the process, some of the cake stands fixed to the table broke again, causing more frustration. I also had to reinforce the curtains, as some broke in the middle.

The walls on both sides and the roof didn't fit well as I mentioned, but especially, the attic didn't fit at all. I made severe errors in size and angle calculations, leading to gaps as wide as 7 millimetres, which I had to fill with icing. To cover the ugly result, I added grey piping to look like bricks. It was the most complicated 3D project with the most errors I have ever done!

 

The day before the completion, my younger daughter bought small LED lights on her way home from the library so that you could see the inside of the house better, but it looked like it was on fire...