Owl's House

A second gingerbread house, made without a single sticky thumb of child's influence but with reverent attention to A A Milne's Pooh of Pooh corner.

"Owl lived at The Chestnuts, and old-world residence of great charm, which was grander than anybody else's, or seemed so to Bear, because it had both a knocker and a bell-pull. Underneath the knocker there was a notice which said:


     
      PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD.
     


      Underneath the bell-pull there was a notice which said:


     
      PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID.
     



      These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST."

Here's E.H. Shepard's illustration. Being halfway up a tree, it's not the easiest subject for gingerbreadification, but after Elsa's Frozen castle I felt magically all-powerful.

Cinderella Christmas Cake

Another kiddy kristmas spektakular - this time, Cinderella getting ready for a rather seasonal ball.

Iona helpfully designed me a fairy godmother:

I painted her on to royal icing, in a vaguely Rackham-influenced scene that I improvised in the last hours of Christmas Eve.

Oddments of marzipan went to make buttons and cotton reels for the "frame" - I remember the dress-making scene in the Disney Cinderella having a huge influence on me wanting to make clothes, so wanted to echo their enticing chaos. The sides of the cake are indented to look like quilting, with a fabric-like ruffle and marks like tiny stitches.

Thank heavens for tiny nine year old thumbs to help make those buttons: they were made from a tiny ball of marzipan, indented with the lid of a Berol felt tip to make the rings, then holed with a toothpick.

 

Elsa's Ice Castle

Never give a nine year old girl free rein over the theme for your annual gingerbread house...Or maybe do. This was a huge amount of fun, and consumed a whole day in a flurry of planning, making and icing sugar. My niece Iona (said nine year old girl) drew some pretty elaborate plans

Which clearly called for a whole 3D diorama, not the mimsy little castle I'd imagined. She was particularly keen on the narrative elements: the treacherous ice bridge, Elsa's balcony, and Anna's struggle up the mountain on a rope.

 

We paused the YouTube video of Frozen again and again to unravel the fiendish architectural plottings of Elsa's ice magic. I still don't really understand how her nest of ice promontories fits together, and most of them were cut from our still-complicated scheme. What did stay was the way she makes the floor from a single, swollen-up snowflake. Our castle was built on a hexagonal floor plan, with gothic arched windows made from melted Fox's glacier mints. How appropriate.

 

The rest of the scene was built from a dentist's nightmare of meringues, cake, and 2 kg of icing sugar. Iona had the brainwave of adding an ice rink for Elsa to skate on, and was insistent that we didn't leave out the liquorice rope, even if the mountain wasn't quite high enough for a truly perilous ascent.

Here's the castle when Iona went to bed: a sticky but structurally sound monolith of gingerbread and icing sugar. But that night I performed the delicate operation of threading battery-operated fairy lights through its rooms. In the morning, we couldn't face the thought of yet more gingerbread - the castle had over 20 separate pieces to bake - so we printed out more Frozen characters to live in it. Here's an aerial view...

And here it is, sitting in state and sisterly love as we ate Christmas dinner.