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 "2024 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:
2023 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)
Link 2 (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.

Due to a small amount of participants, I have opted to to give everyone a placement prize. The only exception is Dragoil, who cannot win a placement prize as a Site Artist. However, they win the Diamond Raffle by default!

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] x3


Faeyla



Falkinsey



Lavenderrain


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] x2


Godith


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


Angelzrulez



Kalores



Nocturnia77


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, [Avatar Item (Winter - Retired)] x3, [Frost Token] x1,000


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

2nd Place Raffle Winner
Winner: N/A
Prize: 1,000

3rd Place Raffle Winner
Winner: N/A
Prize: 500

Here's mine ^^

Here is my entry for the Gingerbread House Contest:







This one was made with a little extra love. I got a gingerbread house kit, and my second cousins helped me to decorate it on Christmas day. I did all the icing detailing and most of the decorating, but they helped me out with some of it, when they were not distracted with playing with their new Christmas presents! XD The trees and gingerbread men fell victim to their hunger as we were decorating! XD

Gingerbroreo train :) devoured by my sibling shortly after making

Just wanted to let you know your images are broken. :) I would recommend using a site like Imgur if possible. Discord links have been pretty un-trustworthy lately!

Thanks Pirate! They were working earlier. I'll get them changed over soon :)

After the ginormous castle last year, I was racking my brains on what to do next. Then my husband had to say: "You haven't done a ship". Brain latched onto Pirate ship!. But how am I going to do a curved front? Don't care, Pirate ship! But, what about sails? Don't care, Pirate ship! Okay...pirate ship it is. Sometimes my brain is my own worst enemy. :P

Started with doodles and making a few models. Turns out lego boxes are great for making models.


Once I had the general shape in mind, I started thinking about how the heck to make a curved front. In the meantime made up a batch of gingerbread.


Found some cheap cake molds that I had picked up because they were cheap. Turns out they were really easy to squish into a curved mold to bake on!


They were pretty narrow, so had to bake three pieces and glue them together with royal icing. Since I only had one mold, could only bake one piece at a time. And glued together a mast out of large pretzels while I had the icing out. Also learned that there isn't enough food coloring in the state to make brown royal icing...tan looks great!


Low and behold! It actually looks like the front of a ship!


Now that the front was done, was able to make pattern pieces for the rest of the ship and started baking.


Really starting to look like a ship! Was so happy I remembered before doing the candy windows that ships have red and green lights on specific sides. So, was able to not only make the windows festive, but also nautically correct! Also started working on tootsie roll snowball cannons with gingerbread wheels.


So, sails...fruit rollups! Where the heck are those in the grocery store. After wandering many isles, found the best ones possible...tie dyed fruit rollups. Had to glue several together using water to get enough for a sail. Used melted gumdrops to glue pretzels to the top and bottom for stability.


Had to make the mast a bit longer and then used royal icing to glue it to the sail.


Need a crows nest, so baking up a few more pieces using a recycled sliced olives can.


Crows nest all festive and with added snowballs made from jet-puff bits (tiny freeze dried marshmallows)


Turns out fruit rollups are significantly heavier than I anticipated. The pretzel supports didn't stand a chance. So, back to the shipyard the sail went. Fortunately, was able to reinforce with more pretzels and royal icing.
Gave the ship hull a painting with leftover dark chocolate from truffle making.
Everything finally in place (lego figures to show size)


Closeup of the desk, chair and bed in the captain's cabin as well as the snowball cannons.


Don't let the cute cinnamon gummy bear crew fool you! These pirates are the worst kind. They roam the Lost Grove lake, ready to pelt anyone who dares to even think about making a bridge with a cannon barrage of snowballs!

**Sorry, I got a little carried away while decorating so missed some pictures in between, hopefully it is clear enough that I made this. Also, I did have to use wooden toothpicks for stability, everything else is edible and I ate it right after I finished taking pictures, it was delicious.

The sense of deja vu is real!

Getting ready


Building started


Basic Structure done!


Creating bottles and jars


Completed side view


Astryl's Apothecary front view


Side and back view


Front and side view


Inspired by the local apothecary in my Mother's village!

Pre fab Gingerbread house...

Hi Gang another Staff entry (so just doing for funsies really)

I usually do big beautiful gingerbread houses.. not this year, this year I had my nose poked for thinking of it.. Why? I usually spend a lot on it and go a little crazy. Instead, this year I bought three prefab houses and the girl's and I decorated one each with Xmas candies in our stockings and that I have for various things.. so a bit more budget House this year. Still fun to do!

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So finished house looks a mess, and a bit angry, but happy holidays from us!