10 hours of icing, biting cinnamon toast crunch, cutting candy canes and freaking out over my sugar glass mistakes...I'M FINALLY FINISHED!

I gotta say that I'm really proud of this gingerbread house. It's the first house I've ever made that hasn't come out of some kid-friendly kit from Costco. I was on Pinterest looking at gingerbread houses when I came across one similar to this and decided to tackle it. My house isn't exactly a replica of that beautiful Pinterest house (let's be honest things in real life can never look as good as Pinterest things)...BUT the structure, windows and flower pots look pretty darn similar.

I really didn't know if my sugar glass would turn out okay or not; the first batch I made was very sticky and I attached it to two window spaces on my gingerbread. I had another decorated piece with the stained glass but the glass was too sticky and stuck onto the parchment paper which in turn ripped my gingerbread in half :(

I ended up making a second batch of sugar glass and it turned out much stiffer, less sticky and much more clear. The colour gives the house a glowing, warm effect.

I covered the roof with cinnamon toast crunch. The shape, colour and texture of the cereal is perfect for my house! On the smaller part of my roof I had to bite the cereal in half to get mini pieces (delicious...) 

The icicles dripping off of the roof was totally a last minute decision but I kind of like the way it looks (although they're a little short and too rounded in my opinion)

Assembling the house was a really stressful experience for me because a lot of my pieces weren't fitting together. I ended up visiting the tech room where the Tech Ed teacher was nice enough to sacrifice two pieces of sand paper to ensure that my pieces would fit.

I used little LED candle lights to light up the inside and it looks too adorable to handle.

Now a quick 360°:

This house took me a long time but all those ooo's and ahhh's from people admiring the little lights and windows really makes me think "Maybe spending 10 hours on a gingerbread house was actually worth it."

MERRY EARLY CHRISTMAS!

Gingerbread houses!

 

This is a little sneak peak of the gingerbread I'm going to be finishing up soon!

Each person in each unit will be making their own gingerbread house and in the end, we'll combine the 4 houses together to create a miniature village.

 

The picture up there is a picture of the dough we made...it was pretty easy to work with at first. The more we wrapped it up and refrigerated the dough, the more oily and crumbly the dough got. However, once rolled out, the dough was nice and smooth.



Here are a couple of my baked pieces that will be assembled to create the gingerbread house :)
Stay tuned for when I finish my house!

This is the pumpkin I carved for Halloween!

I used a template from the internet and I'm super happy with the way it turned out :)



This post is a little bit late but here we go...

Spider Web Cookies!!!

The cookie itself is chocolate and the dough was really easy to work with unlike the rainbow cookies.

 

We iced the cookies with royal icing. The way we created the design was by icing the cookie white, then piping on a spiral and dragging it out with a toothpick to create the spider web effect. Our icing was too thick at the beginning so it was really hard to ice the cookie and have it completely smooth at the top. It was also hard to blend the black into the white when the icing was too thick so we added a spoonful of water to each bowl of icing each time.

I love how the toothpicks created such fine lines with the icing! I had one problem with this design: I iced all of the cookies with the white base icing first so when I piped on the black spiral and tried dragging out the black with the toothpick, it cut through the icing instead of blending.

Here's a cookie I made with a little spider :) I thought that the taste of the cookie was a little bitter and weirdly sweet, maybe it was the cocoa powder? In conclusion, I adore how these cookies turned out appearance wise but I'm not a fan of the taste.

Rainbow Cookies

  So...the first lab of the year: rainbow cookies!! 

 

To make them, we split our dough into 5 uneven balls and coloured them from largest to smallest: red, orange, yellow, green then blue. Then we wrapped the colours around each other starting with blue in the centre then finishing it all off with a layer of red wrapping the outside. We then covered it up in wax paper and placed it in the fridge to harden since the dough was quite soft.

Two days later, we removed the tube of rainbow cookie dough. The colours in our cookies were quite squished and swirled together as you can see in the picture above so Sophia and I decided to perform some "cookie surgery" by fixing the colours with excess coloured dough. This is a photo of the cookies before being baked. Also, we found that we had to place it back into the freezer really often so that it could harden up. Otherwise the dough was practically impossible to work with.

This is a photo of what the cookies looked like once they came out of the oven! Aren't they kind of adorable? The colours are not very messy in some and just all over the place in some of the cookies which was a little bit disappointing but that's okay because they tasted amazing. If you can't tell from the photo, the cookies spread out a lot in the oven and turn out very light and soft when warm.

Here's a detailed shot of the cookie on its side once I took a bite out of it. The colours are so vibrant!And the cookie itself was very chewy and soft...the only negative thing I would say about this recipe is that the food colouring leaves an interesting after taste that's not that pleasant :(. Other than that, I LOVE THIS COOKIE!

These are a couple experimental cookies that we created out of excess dough! I tried to make a rainbow snowman but that just melted into a blob of disgusting-ness in the oven.

Can't wait for the next lab!

Welcome to my blog! So this is where I will be posting photographs of food art created in food class along with some deep captions! Hopefully after a year of hard-core food art training I will be able to learn how to cover a cake with fondant aha... woo Food Art 2014/2015 let's goo