Gingerbread House Feature
“The Children Were Nestled All Snug In Their Beds”
from The Night Before Christmas
Made by Linda Carney
VIDEO: Behind the Scenes with Linda Carney
This award-winning gingerbread house, entitled, “The Children Were Nestled All Snug In Their Beds,” was made by Linda Carney, who is the administrator of a wonderful Facebook group called Gingerfriends (if you are an avid gingerbread house artist, please join!). Her cookie structure placed 5th overall in the Omni Grove Park Inn’s 2013 Gingerbread House Competition, which takes place annually in Asheville, North Carolina. It is the most prestigious gingerbread house competition in the U.S.A.
The details in this piece are incredible. The fireplace is baked gingerbread with molded accents. The flames are made of wafer paper painted with edible paint and then curled using a dowel dipped in vodka.
Linda hung edible stockings by the chimney with care, with green fondant garlands made by bunching up shapes made by a snowflake cutter and securing them to the mantle with edible tylose “glue.”
The fondant children are nestled all snug in their gingerbread beds.
This cradle is made of gingerbread and the figure and quilt are made of fondant. To make the floor, Linda said: The floor of this structure is gingerbread baked in sheets and textured using an impression mat. Each sheet was then painted to look like wood. Each sheet was then cut into 1/2 x 4″ planks and all the planks were mixed up. The floor was then laid just like a real wood floor.
Here is Linda’s explanation for how she made the extraordinary blue quilt: “The quilt is a sheet of blue fondant and I used a paper template on top to mark where the cream should be. The cream fondant was stenciled with petal dust and cut into squares, and placed on the quilt. I covered the finished quilt with plastic and pressed the cream into the blue. I peeled the template off and draped it on the bed while it was still soft.”
Thank you, Linda Carney, for sharing your award-winning gingerbread house masterpiece plus so many tips and tricks about gingerbread house artistry. You are at the top of your craft!
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