The Gingerbread Extravaganza

When my family started planning for Christmas holidays this year, the topic of gingerbread houses came up.  In the past, my dad has helped make some really cool ones, like the hobbit hole that he made with our cousins.  What started as a joke about making Lonely Mountain (clearly, there's a theme here - we're big Hobbit fans), turned into an actual plan to make Lonely Mountain and the lake and Laketown with the dwarves coming down the river in barrels.  So not just any gingerbread house, but an extravagant gingerbread scene.  It wasn't a quick process - it took the better part of a week - and there were many people involved.  In the end though, it looked pretty awesome!!!

It started off with a big tabletop and rice krispies sculpted and molded into the shape of Lonely Mountain.  Also molded out of rice krispies were the rocky hills by the mouth of the river and the head of Smaug, which was then covered in chocolate.  The lake was made out of crushed jolly ranchers, which were melted in the oven and then sealed together with extra jolly rancher powder and a propane torch.

putting Smaug onto the pipe

After that, my mother made some marshmallow fondant to cover Lonely Mountain and the hills. Then we used Rolos and more fondant to make the dwarves in the barrels.

dwarves in progress!  The one in the back has its legs sticking out

Once all of the lake pieces were sealed together, we made Hollywood glass (sugar glass) to pour on top of it to make it even and less sticky.  At first, it was glassy and reflective, but it ended up becoming super sticky later on.  Humidity maybe?  We had to be really careful while pouring out the molten sugar since it could burn us badly.  It also hardened a lot fast than we anticipated, making the spreading difficult.  The Hollywood glass also turned the lake kind of green.  Not what we were expecting!

making the Hollywood glass

Then it was time to make the gingerbread houses!  We cut out the pieces, and then they were glued together with royal icing and set aside to be decorated.

Then, I got to decorate Lonely Mountain with gold coins (butterscotch wafers sprayed with metallic paint) and decorate the arch welcoming the dwarves into Laketown.

Next came the bridge into Laketown, which would also cover the wires and the battery pack for the LED lights we were putting beneath the houses.  Once the bridge was built, we laid out the position of the houses with toothpicks and set graham crackers on top of the lights to hold them in place until the houses were finished.

Then it was time for the houses!!!  My older sister had a couple of her fellow PhD students over to help decorate, and they did a great job!  My sister's house had a deck and a hot tub out back, one of the other houses had a big face on it, and a third house had a circular window cut out with a candy man sticking out of it.  My house was the last to go on, and it had a little porch and a ladder going down to a canoe molded out of a tootsie roll.  We laid a little floating path between the houses and cut up some Swedish fish to look like they were jumping out of the lake.

This is what it looked like in the end!!!

The final touch was to make smoke come out of Smaug's mouth.  This was done with some tubing, tupperware, and dry ice.  It looked really cool!  Of course, we couldn't just leave it at that...  Since we had a filmmaker staying with us, there had to be a video!  Sadly, I missed out on this last bit of fun (and on eating the thing!) since it happened just after we left for Texas.  Overall though, it was a really fun process!  An extravaganza for sure :)

2013 Smaug from Joe Winston on Vimeo.