Gingerbread House Festival

Gingerbread House Festival

Early in the month of November I was in the competitive spirit and started searching for any cake or ginger bread contests. I came across the Ivory Homes Gingerbread House Festival and decided to enter. It was only $10, and the 1st prize was $1,000 plus an additional $1,000 to a charity of your choice. The rules were that you had to choose one of their 300+ house plans and then design and model your home after it and then add your own creative spin on it. I chose their Oleander European house plan and then after discussing with my design consultant, my wife, we decided to decorate it with nostalgic Christmas Movie Characters and items. One of the main reasons we chose this is to cater toward the judging criteria. One-third of the voting was Facebook Voting, one-third Event Attendees and the last third was the judges scoring. Since two-thirds of the voting is by the public we wanted to conjure up great memories of watching classic Christmas films as people saw our gingerbread house. As you can see below I won 1st prize, $1,000! Plus an additional $1,000 which I donated to the charity I manage at my day job, the doTERRA Healing Hands Foundation. See all the pictures below to see the details I included on my gingerbread masterpiece for the Gingerbread House Festival. 

As you can see the other houses were very well done! 

 The finished product before delivering it to the competition. The roof is made of graham cereal and the lights round the house are chocolate covered sunflower seeds. The snow around the house is made of dried royal icing put into the food processor. Most of the characters and other details are made with fondant. 

 Who doesn't love the Grinch? He is made with gum paste and fondant. 

 Theres Frosty! And of course the leg lamp box from A Christmas Story, FRA-GEE-LAY, it must be Italian! Frosty and the leg lamp box are made with fondant. The windows are made with colored isomalt sugar. You can see the side of the house from here as well, before baking the gingerbread I imprinted it with a brick pattern and then after I built the house I airbrushed it dark brown. 

Its the Bumble with no teeth! Don't you know that bumbles bounce?! It is made with fondant and his hair was done with coconut flakes. You can get a good view of the lights from here. 

A classic site in many Christmas movies. The main one we were going for was Christmas Vacation. I know of course that the car is all wrong, I had this car leftover from a cake decorating competition I did earlier this year and it seemed perfect for this cake! The car and the tree are made of fondant.