Rapunzel Rapunzel, a Gingerbread House Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, in a deep dark enchanted forest of sparkling green trees, there lived a sweet buttery girl name Rapunzel. An evil and wicked witch had taken her as a baby and locked her away in a tall lonely gingery tower with only grape-cherry stained glass windows to give color to her day. She spent her time brushing her long golden marzipan scented locks and singing songs to the velvet chocolate deer and other animals below.

One sunny fine spring day a Prince who was riding by on his strong cinnamon steed fell in love with the fair maiden and after calling to her and seeing she was locked away in the door-less tower, promised to return that night to rescue her.

Rapunzel was very flattered by the handsome Prince and knew she wanted to go away with him to be his Princess. That night she lit all her tower candles to help him find his way through the forest. 

When he finally arrived with a beautiful spring flower, he called up, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your long hair!” and climbed on the chocolatey rocks.  Rapunzel was delighted, and lowered her beautiful pale almond locks .

… And so they lived happily ever after in his kingdom, where sweet Rose Gingerbread cottages, jelly bean paths and candy topped castles filled the land.

 I was inspired to enter my first Gingerbread house contest by Movitabeaucoup.com  who has a contest on her fabulous blog every year.   Okay I learned a lot about what will and won’t work with Gluten-free gingerbread “architectural” cookies ( so many of them broke as they didn’t get very firm, which delighted my boyfriend who kept asking when he could eat the broken pieces) and having to get creative about how to support the structures and keep the gingerbread animals and people upright for the display and photo shoot.  It all started with a brainstorming and first drawing of what I had envisioned for my Rapunzel.

 

So the work started with creating all the pieces and cutting them out by hand and by cookie cutters and molds.

I figured out pretty quickly the tower pieces would need to be supported and used a rectangular cardboard box as a support with some wooden popsicle sticks stuck on to the backs.

Then the decorating fun began, with learning how to melt hard candies into the crevices of the window openings to create wonderful stained glass windows. It worked!  Also made the house smell like grapes and cherries.

 

I used plenty of melted chocolate to decorate the house and the animals as I liked the natural matte look once it hardened up.

I really wanted this wonderful old tower to have real fire torches to light up the way at night and show the light through the beautiful stained glass windows… birthday candles did the trick!

The daylight photo shoot of Rapunzel meeting her prince:

I went inside for a moment while leaving the photo shoot set up in the garden and returned just in time to see a squirrel about to “visit” the enchanted forest for a taste of the life there.

What a fun time this last week was! I laughed a lot, cleaned the kitchen and floor about 40 times and learned moving slowly, having patience and being creative was pretty key to keeping the project moving forward.

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Tags: cookie, deer, fairy tale, forest, gingerbread, house, stained glass

• December 16, 2014
• Gluten-Free baking, Pure Fun
• 3 Comments