Gingerbread Part Two

Ta daa... one fully functioning gingerbread house. Every bit of it edible.

The square bit in the garden is a vegetable garden people. A. Vegetable. Garden. (and not a "square bit with hamster-dropping-things in it"). And the green stuff artistically scattered about the dish is grass - and yes I put grass in the garden and not your usual snowmen because it is an Australian Gingerbread house.  Was going to put in an above ground pool (blue jelly in a ramekin dish) but didn't have room.

Back view.

Note cunning jelly belly wall down on the bottom right there. Covers monumental cock-up involving a lot of very runny icing.

Tips for anyone interested.

1. Reinforce roof with wooden skewers - stick them on the back with icing
   
2. Use glass headed dressmaking pins to hold structure together when gluing with the icing - dont forget to remove them :)
3. Once you've added the icing sugar to the eggwhite beat on high for a long time - ten minutes or so. If icing is dripping off the house then its not been beaten enough. Icing should hold its shape and lollies shouldn't drop off.
4. Dont mix your green food colouring into the coconut 'grass' by hand - green thumbs!
5. Even though you think it will be fun to include your children when decorating - don't do it to yourself. They only want to eat the lollies, nag, whine and bicker and then go hyper on you the minute their little system tries to process all that sugar and food colouring.  Do what I do and save that part for when you have your entire extended family present.

Of course because this wasn't enough, I also harvested about 10kgs of plums from next doors tree. They taste wonderful and I'm almighty chuffed about it - they'll ripen in the next few days - if we leave them to go ripe on the tree the birds get them all.

Watch this space for a thousand plum recipes...

:)