Originally I was going to just make a large house.

I had a major derp moment and sort of forgot the forum games exist - was making the house just for fun. As such I wasn't taking pictures of the process of making the large house. Oh well. Here's some of the templates I used, though:
https://imgur.com/a/rMnycKz

And here's the finished, half-decorated product, the first picture of the thing I actually took after my revelation that this contest exists:
https://imgur.com/a/bneoSVV

Got my hands on a gingerbread kit and this time I remembered to take pictures from the beginning.
https://imgur.com/a/NZLlySu

Since there were four houses I decided to go for a four seasons look. Process photo:
https://imgur.com/a/zK4AScY

Finished product. Used some spare fondant for the snowman, and added in a cute sugar figurine doggo found at Target. Also finished the original large house.
https://imgur.com/a/4RyHecq

Tried to do a fancy backdrop thing. It was... acceptable.
http://imgur.com/a/hqpyFHx

Overall, it didn't come out too bad. I apologise for the woeful lack of process photos. I also apologise for the fact that these are all links, but the post preview refused to show the images, so I'm playing it safe.

Definitely getting a sense of deja vu from this sticky mess! I will make the date clearer on the next image.


Beginning to assemble the ground floor, plus the cobbled driveway.


Discovered the technique of marbling by adding two colours of icing together - great for the 100+ flagstones :)


Adding a layer of icing to the pieces for the top floor.


Took a photo after the top floor had been added. It is rather precarious and until the icing has hardened I am not going near it again!


The roof is finished - chocolate chunks for the slates. Now working on the icing windows and the cola straw beams.


Mass window production! One icing pen was more co-operative than the other.


Moved out of the kitchen but not great lighting. Side and rear view


And side and front view


And returned to the kitchen for the completed house, rear view


And finally the front view


So this is a Tudor Gatehouse. It would be sited at one entrance to a large estate.This is rather a grand one as many were much smaller. From here the gatekeeper could control who could, or could not, have access to the main manor house.

I finally have an entry for this contest! Normally, I don't enter this contest because I'm not much of a cook, decorating is messy and often doesn't work for me, and I don't usually have suitable food stuff around that I can actually eat.
This time, I brainstormed beforehand so I would have a plan ready to go! I managed to find a food I could build with, and no baking involved!


And as you can see, that food is....Marshmallows! What will I be doing with them? Let's see!



All right, I've got my mortar ready to go...(White chocolate chips, melted)



Ah, looks like walls are being built:


Most of the pieces are here (although I had a wall to do still)


I've built myself a castle!




It still seemed like it could use something, so...I made a moat!




And a bird's-eye view, because I thought it looked cool:

Gingerbread House 6: Castle of the Storm Lord

Hello again, my dear friends. I knew from the end of last year's contest that the next build I would attempt would be a castle, but the inspiration for this particular castle came from this year's summer festival, which introduced a new optional boss: Vardune, Storm's Fury. Now, Krin has said that map icons of NPCs are meant to represent more than just a static character, so I thought to myself: "Yeah, he's gotta be living it up in a sweet sweet castle on this tiny island. What might that look like..?"

The sickly smell of melted chocolate wafts in the breeze..
also brace yourself there's 90something pictures to look at, maybe grab a snack or something


We begin with the setup for making the castle itself, which is a mixture of flour and salt rolled fairly thin. I couldn't find a rolling pin, so I used that yellow can of furniture polish.


After it was rolled out, I tore it to shreds to mimic stonework and left it to dry a little bit. Part of it I wrapped around a paper towel roll to make curved pieces.


Here's a closeup. It's very sparkly.


I ended up making about three pans of saltdough pieces to fill those bags, finishing he drying process in the oven. Super important to drive out all possible moisture for maximum longevity in this humid climate. Essentially, I've made something like hardtack/ship's biscuits.
The round circles are to mark where I shape two towers for the castle.


Making my own gray royal icing, classic culinary cement


You can tell it's good when it can hold its shape like that.


I have /so many tools/ for this stuff


I just chose pieces at random to try to fit together, to make them look as much like real stonework as possible.


Yes, this was done one piece at a time. For the whole build. Including shaping the icing around the pieces everysingletime


One layer down, 90284 more to go..



I was worried they would lose their circular shape or start leaning weirdly so I added spaghetti bracers on the insides.


Spaghetti supports also provided more surface area for the dough fragments to stick to. Fallen towers are bad things.


Spaghetti worked great and this is the final tower height, about 7 inches.


Now for the walls, which I made and dried flat.


I was sure to use greased parchment paper to prevent the icing from glueing the walls to the cutting board, as well as measure.


I was filling in small gaps as I went, since the pieces are pretty thin. Stability is key!


With the walls and tower bases done, I needed tower tops, which I decided to make out of popcorn and melted chocolate, so that they would look like clouds. Storm castle needs clouds!


I shaped them around plastic bowls for a vaguely round shape


One ended up slightly mangled in the process of removing it from around the bowl, but I fixed it by manually adding more popcorn, one kernel at a time, by dipping them into white icing and sticking them to the existing clump. You'll see the completed tower tops in a later image.


I had to put the walls up without them leaning or falling down, which is the purpose of these "keystones". They gave me something to brace the walls against. Pretty vital for an open-back design.


They worked really well. Look how thin those walls are! Luckily I did great at icing and they were incredibly sturdy.




big fancy doors with pasta inlays!


The roof of this castle I decided to make out of graham crackers..



with stone-dough pieces on one side for the outside of the castle..




and melted chocolate/spaghetti crossbeams on the other side for the inside of the castle!



Here is the setting for Big Fancy Doors, featuring a strip of dough pieces i made separately and attached to the "frame" around the doors. Also, these are the finished tower tops.


Here's a look from the inside of the castle. I put handles on this side too. They're cheerios!


Now we get to the furniture and sculpting fun. I decided to try a new medium: melted chocolate mixed with flour. It wasn't as sticky as fondant or gum paste, and solidified very quickly.


It made very nice tables, tree trunks, sacks, and shelving.

Oh, and a chocolate-version of a storm lord too. He has popcorn-cloud-shoulderpads.




He watched me make banners and finish the furniture for his castle.


Included in the treasures for the inside are simple representations of all the houses I've made so far. From left to right: two-story toast house, log cabin, lighthouse, treehouse, and single-level toast house.

Stormlord's crown sure looks an awful lot like.. antlers?? Nah, that must be coincidental.





I crushed candy canes with a mortar and pestle to mix them with melted white chocolate and make the castle floor. Nice and colorful, like.. gem-inlayed marble.



Mixing some blue icing to add rain to the popcorn cloud tower tops~




Getting the roof put on. The front of it was sort of weirdly shaped, but I made it work.




Getting the furniture and plants put in! Banners up! Chocolate-lump-rocks.. rockin'!


Only those than can defeat the stormlord can pilfer his treasure hoard. Graham cracker supports are only temporary and get removed later~


I thought the hoard could use more color, so i crushed candy into pretty gems.




It's time for some beach terrain! The bowl on the left is for the beach itself(biscuit mix/bunny crackers/breading), and the bowl on the right is coarse scrubby dirt (rice/candycanes/graham cracker/croutons/chocchips)


I used dark chocolate to attach the coarser dirt


and white chocolate to attach the beach sand




The terrain always looks so.. real. Also, I made a bridge, for when the tide comes in. Assuming you can even find the place.



Bonus noodle flotsam! They're dyed black with food dyes. Also, cashew-shells. Cashells?



Here's the inside with all those pretty gems.



I needed an ocean, so sugarwork goooo





I could manipulate the sugar a little bit after pouring it and letting it cool down by poking at it and dragging it around with a fork, to give it some dimension.


flotsaaam







I melted jolly ranchers in the microwave to melt them, then sort of mooshed them together with my bare hands and stretched them around the window frame.











With that, the castle build is complete!! This whole process took about three weeks or so between full-time-job work hours. It was a magnificent experience, and I hope you enjoyed the visual stroll through the process. Happy Winterfest!!

I decided to try to do two non-creepy houses this year for a scene. I knew I wanted to try having trees as part of it. You might notice the third building in the picture of the kits but I never got to making that one because of how long it was taking to get the houses to set and I'm not sure when I'd have ever gotten to bed. I think it came out pretty tranquil though with just the two buildings I did do though.







I first started work on the house that was mostly white and red. Both of the kits I used had these really pretty sugar crystals to use for decoration. I also included bits of some sort of twizzlers.









At this point, the directions called for letting the pieces set for a while so I turned to working on the blue house. I got these pretty pearl shaped sprinkles that I thought matched to add to the roof.









After this, it came to trying to assemble the first house. This is when things went really wrong because the icing just wouldn't hold the house together. That's when I decided to try using some of the green icing I got for the trees. Thankfully this worked and I ended up decorating more with the green icing. I also added twizzler columns and later at some point added a couple more strips of twizzlers to the front of the house. Also included were these round red candies that came with the kit.











At this point I turned back to the blue house. I had the same problems of getting the house to stay put together. I finally resorted to trying more of the green icing but on the inside to not be noticeable. I ended up having to prop up the front of the house with a candy cane. Finally it stuck together.











I ended up not getting any in progress pictures of the Christmas trees because the green icing was just so much of a mess. I got a picture of the icing and the sprinkles I used though. They were used on ice cream cones that I set upside down in the scene for trees. I ended up using quite a bit of this icing by the time everything was over.







I did some more scenery stuff after this. I added sugar for snow. I ended up modifying the red/green/white house a bit more. I made a pond using leftover blue icing and sugar crystals. I also tried including candy canes. To make the candy canes stand up I used a lot of candy to try to get them to stay upright that was then covered by sugar. I couldn't really let go of them to take a picture showing the candy being used under the sugar.



















Bonus picture is Gizmo being curious about what I'm doing.

Should have posted this awhile back but I got busy. I hope my work counts. @-@: I realize some of my dates are wrong. I started on 12/30 in 2020 but completely finished it in 2021 on January 8th. Right after I got done my brothers decided to bust in my windows immediately. I, kinda wished I took a picture of it.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, a being was upheaved and stranded in a barren land of ice. Knowing that they needed a place to keep them safe, they searched for anything to build a structure with.
With nothing around but ice, they used what they had -ice.
They gathered up the broken shards and brought them to a sturdy plot.

(My graham crackers arrived shattered but I would not be defeated by such an arbitrary limitation! >:D And peanutbutter glue because peanutbutter is the answer to all things, yes? That and the eternal struggle against "royal icing"'s tyranny...)
Diligently, construction began...
First, the main spire.

And then the wings.

With the wings finished, they constructed fine entrance doors to be able to come and go in and out of the magnificent ice palace sanctuary.

Finally, an icy river for sustenance and to repel dangers.

With basic safety in place, the being prepared to attempt to survive the unknown duration of this exile.

Happy Winter Fest everyone! I procrastinated (per usual) and spent the entire day baking, building, and decorating this gingerbread house~ :D

I used a regular gingerbread base (made from scratch) and then went crazy with the decorating. More details will be posted below, but I attempted to base it on different Sylesti breeds: lunes, aurls, faes, rikkis, and more!



Somewhat out of line, I made the cookie dough for the house last nightinstead of waiting 'til the last minute. Based on NYT's gingerbread house recipe, my dough had a couple tweaks here and there (mainly because I forgot to add several ingredients and had to substitute half of the molasses for honey xD).



Here are my 6 patties ready to refrigerate and chill overnight! In total, I used about 12 cups or 1600 grams of flour, so these boys weighed a hefty ton. :p



I definitely forgot to take additional pictures during this phase, but I rolled out of bed bright and early (alright, I might have overslept 'til after noon...) to bake and assemble this house. I only had one cookie cutter, so I cut out the other shapes from templates printed out online.



And here are some of my pieces straight from the oven! I made these in ~4 batches, and yes, I did forget to take half of those batches out of the oven so some of them were quite...brown. xD No worries, icing will cover any rough patches.



After allowing the side pieces to cool, I started to assemble my house on a wooden cutting board. There were definitely some rough patches where the pieces wouldn't fit perfectly together or the sides would sag sadly into each other, but in the end everything pulled through, thankfully. c:



And here is my assembled house before the decorating craze started!



To assemble and decorate my pieces, I made a big batch of royal icing and dyed them different colors.



Oops, I definitely forgot to take pictures while I maniacally slabbed icing and candy on my house. xD But I made the little Christmas tree out of an ice cream cone + some green royal icing, then stuck skittles on it and drew lights with strips of white icing. For the door step, I started with a base of mini marshmallows, then continued on to stick "bricks" of gingerbread to simulate red brick steps (the brown icing was just a mix of all the other colors, lol).



Because the gingerbread bricks didn't completely cover the white steps, I ground up some extra gingerbread to create a rough dust and sprinkled it on the steps and ground to create a quaint dirt road.



Wow, I really did not take any in-between pictures( apologies for that). But tada, here is my finished housecomplete with a gingerbread plank door, grape-flavored skittle frame, and red button handle.



Here's the top view of my house; the chimney looks, oddly, very large for some reason, and filled with faux "snow" to top. xp




On the one side of my roof, I have a cute 'lil lunemara and aurleon hanging out. It's a bit hard to tell, but the little blob on the left is the moth creature, with a gingerbread crumb for a body and dots of royal icing for the wing genes. The aurleon was supposed to have a feathery body, so I figured that cut up pieces of mini marshmallow would do. I, er, might have been mistaken about thatI'm not quite sure what it looks like now, but I would definitely not describe it as feathery. xD Regardless, I'm quite proud of how these two sylestis turned out.



And right below the aurl and lune we have the rikki! Again, I know it doesn't quite resemble a rikki as you may know it, but hey I tried my best. Honestly, the best way I could describe it would be a lemon bush. xD And yes, all these sylestis were created separately and then painstakingly glued onto the sides and roofs.



On the other side, we have the qitari and candy cane wonderland. I used a special piping tip to decorate the mane and tail, then sliced up some marshmallows for the scales on the back.



The back of the house showcases a smol gingerbread boi and his mini Christmas tree; my sister joked that it resembled Krin and now I can't get that mental image out of my head. :p



Here's a scary close-up of the faelora on the front porch! I accidentally got some powder sugar on it while I was dusting my house, so it looks quite sickly hehe.



Closeup of said Christmas tree~ :)



One more closeup of the front of the house! I really love the textured granules of the dirt road and the puffed-up layers of the bricks. I would definitely live in this house if I could. ;)



Last but not least, the other side of my roof showcases a (slightly deranged looking) faelora. I achieved this textured, furry look by spreading some icing on the body and sprinkling the gingerbread dust all over.

I had a surprisingly fun time baking, constructing, and decorating this house! Happy Winter Fest everybody. :D

So, having never made a gingerbread house before, I figured this was going to be interesting. It was.

Note: I forgot to put 'Winter Festival' in my id tag at the start but the last images have it.

First I made the dough from scratch using the recipe so nicely provided by Dragoil. :) After refrigerating it, I got it out to begin the process with my handy template I made:




The process has begun, as you can see in this first batch of pieces headed toward the oven. (Watch those jolly ranchers. They're going to become important later on. ;) )



More cutting. It felt like a never ending process.



I started making the icing.



This vaguely resembles the Tardis. It is not the Tardis. Here we can see the first coat of icing paint has been applied. It'll need another 2-3 coats before the ugly turquoise color vanishes. (Trust me, it's there.) Also here you can see the jolly rancher stained glass windows for the first time. :)



I got bored, so I began the process of creating a gingerbread snowman... err.. snowgriffi. :)



Here are some of the pieces after they've had all their paint applied. The balconies have been added.
https://i.imgur.com/4j84GXB.png


The process of trying to get the houses to stick together has begun.



While I'm waiting for icing to dry, I begin preparing the landscaping. I used both flour and powdered sugar to give the snow more depth.



And we're done!



Camera didn't want to work right, but I didn't realize until the end that it wasn't. :/

Edit: Just nabbed a couple of pics using my sister's cell and they allow the details of the stained glass to be seen :):

Another last minute entry as usual :P Seeing that this is the first time I've ever made a gingerbread house, I probably should have started earlier >.>

I started planning this last night and made the dough to chill overnight.




This morning, I cut out all the house pieces and baked them in several batches.


While the pieces were baking and cooling, I made the royal icing, which was a lot easier than anticipated :D


Around midafteroon, I had everything I needed to start assembling the house!


A couple of hours later... I'm quite surprised how well this turned out actually! The sides fell in a couple of times before I figured out how long I need to support the pieces before they can stand by themselves, but it turned out alright ^^


While I was waiting for the icing to set, I set to work making some homemade fondant, which was basically powdered sugar mixed with melted marshmallows. (I forgot to take before pictures, but here's the finished fondant)


With that fondant, I succeeded in making a cute little rikki (after trying and failing to make a griffi, bulb, and fae >.<). This took an unexpectedly long time (~2 hours), but my icing needed to set anyways.

(I also tried to make my avi but umm...that didn't work out)

After this, I got caught up with decorating my house and didn't get any progress pics. Here's the final result though!

My rikki welcomes you to her little christmas cottage with enough candy to last the winter (and a little log pile too!)




Also managed to somewhat salvage my avi, but she's still a hot mess. If I had more time, I would have remade her (she was actually quite cute before I ruined her by attempting to finger color with food coloring), but alas I was pushing the deadline as is.