Gingerbread Project 2024

 

Every year, starting in October, I think about building a healthy version of a gingerbread house with nuts and fruits. Almonds perfectly aligned on the roof. Rosemary garlands and pecan shutters with alternating raisins and dried cranberry Christmas lights. Sigh. Or a wonderful, awful Whoville replete with Mount Crumpit, and roast beast. By mid-December, I'm on to Plan B.

This year, because Little Miss is currently enamoured with dinosaurs, our Plan B went prehistoric.

Usually, inspiration comes from looking online at pictures of what other creative types have done. But when I googled “dinosaur + gingerbread” there wasn’t much I could riff off. It seems most gingerbread projects that involve dinosaurs are basically houses that were smashed by accident. To salvage the situation, plastic dinosaurs from the toy box roam amid gingerbread house fragments, devouring gingerbread men who are dripping with red icing.

Not the look I was going for

Instead I envisioned a diorama with dinosaurs amid trees and ferns from the Cretaceous period with a backdrop of mountains and an erupting volcano. (Erupting with candy, not baking soda and vinegar.)

The first challege was to get the dinosaurs to stand up by themselves. I could have icing-glued them onto a base or cut out interlocking legs, but I opted to make little legs and glue them to the sides of their bodies.

It worked except for T-Rex, who, even though he has teensy tiny arms, was top-heavy and kept falling over. He looked like he was doing pushups. Krista suggested I icing-glue his tail to the base and Voila, upright dino.

Doing push-ups while she waits

 

Krista had already done her cookie thing - adorable mitten sugar cookies (delicious) - but she provided moral support and cookie cutters from her stash. 

Krista's perfect little mitten cookies.

Stegosaurus, T-Rex, and Diplodocus had a certain verisimilitude that Little Miss agreed was acceptable. However, once we cut out the pterodactyl it became clear it was a sea gull. With some trimming and reshaping, we made the shape more Pterodactyl-ish and less Jonathan Livingston.

J.L. Seagull

 

Having just watched a documentary on dinosaurs, the Little Lady added some realistic details like dinosaur eggs in nests, dino egg thieves eating each other's babies and, of course, dinosaur poop. She also required a river with rocks, so there is a river with rocks.

Young Sir advocated for a comet looming overhead, but no. Just no.

When the day of decoration arrived, JP showed up with his own Dungeons-&-Dragons-inspired cookie pieces and bags of candies. I don’t know much about D&D, but once he had worked his magic, I have to admit it turned out to be outstanding.

If you are a D&D fan, you know that's a wizard and not Santa. My bad.

 

After the dinosaur diorama was complete, I sent a picture of the whole shebang to a friend who lives in Hawaii, joking that it wasn’t a very Christmas-y theme. He informed me it was bang on for “Christmas in Hawaii” and sent me a photo of Mount Kīlauea’s holiday display. Thanks Fred!

 

I imagine Fred on his back deck watching Pele's (Hawaiian volcano deity's) Christmas lights.

 

Now on to the behind-the-scenes story.

I always start with a paper prototype.

Not sure where I'm going with this, but hoping it will work

Next step: cut away everything that isn't a limb.

An assortment of arms and legs, ready to go

I've got mountains, 4 volcano sides, dinos, various tree shapes and a bunch of leaves that I'm hoping will turn into prehistoric fern-like plants.
And an almost-pterodactyl shape in the top right corner. Close enough.

 

Little Stegs resting her head while the icing dries

T-Rexes resting while their arms dry and I try to figure out how to make them stand up.

Big pieces get propped up with cans until the glue dries

I added some licorice lava, then painted snow and palm trees on the mountains.
Little Miss is adding details. There's a river, but no rocks yet.

This was my favourite - rainbow stegasaurus

A nest of dinosaur eggs, and a g-bread stegosaurus communing with an ornage jelly stegosaurus

This T-Rex wearing his Santa cap and eating an egg cracks me up.
Note that his tail is glued to the base. No push-ups for this guy.

Dinosaur poop. Hershey's kisses and cookie crumbs.

For the erupting part of the volcano, I glued candy strips to a straw and added lava-coloured candies.

I wanted these to stick out the top of the volcano. They were too heavy to stick to the inside so I pushed bamboo skewers up the hole in the straw and cemented it with icing. One skewer wasn't enough, it kept sliding. But 2 skewers worked perfectly.
The lava sticks in the volcano stood like a bouquet of flowers in a vase.

For the ferns, we outlined them in icing and stuck them on a base of a bell-shaped cookie. Little Miss added a nest to the one on the right. And you can see the pterodactyl in the mountaintop. He did not cooperate and kept trying to break free - no doubt a remnant of his brief incarnation as Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Little Miss gave one T-Rex an egg to eat. The other one is eating a jelly dinosaur with a bite out of it.

Stegasauruses (Stegasauri?) were the most fun to decorate. And you can get an idea of how the spouting lava worked out. Lava sticks were the favourite part to eat after Christmas dinner when a comet, Young Sir disassembled it with one fell swoop.