This year’s gingerbread display is an edible model of Buckingham Palace.  It is as spectacular as ever, displayed on our fireplace mantle.  Kate Webber, Gibbet Hill co-owner, and creator, gives more details about the display below. Scroll down further to see more details of this beautiful artwork!

“As always, other than the lights, everything about the house is edible, including the silver and gold balls, the glitter, and the paints.  Some details about this year’s house:

• The house took approximately 250 hours, 25 lbs of sugar, 96 eggs and 48 lbs of flour.
• The building is 49” wide and 24.5” tall.
• The fence is made out of squid ink pasta.
• The medallions on the fence and on the fence posts are made out of royal icing covered in edible gold paint.
• The windows are made with melted life savers.  Usually we use jolly ranchers because they melt more smoothly, however we wanted a more mottled look this year, and jolly ranchers don’t come in yellow or white.
• The lights are held up by candy canes hooks frosted to the back of the house

New things we learned this year:

• Squid ink pasta in royal icing is actually fairly sturdy as long as you don’t try to line up too many in a row.
• Candy cane trees are quite lovely, although they take a little time if you decide to put little tiny balls all over them.
• You can make shiny balls of icing over balloons for big hollow tops for Christmas trees, but if you want to put glitter all over them you better do that in the garage.
• If you put candy canes in the oven for a few minutes and then take them out, you can bend them.  You can also smoosh them together and they’ll fuse together, but you have a very small window of time.  You can also smoosh them together if you do it over an open flame, which is faster, but it’s more dangerous and really hot.

Credits:

As always, I had a team of elves that helped me.  This year we had two elves promoted to full-status.

Head Elf: Kate Webber

Helper Elf: Nancy Webber

Special Teams Elf: Robin Gustafson

Eldest Elf: Alice MacGregor

Task Completion Elf: Meredith Kelsey

Critical Elf: Keith Goguen

Additional Elf Team: Val Barros, Heather Campbell, Lily Webber, Zack Webber, Sarah Webber.

Thank you all, and Happy Holidays!”

DON’T FORGET WE HAVE A SECOND GINGERBREAD HOUSE WE WILL BE RAFFLING OFF! PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS.