Sunday 4 January 2015

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.
 

 
 

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