Gingerbread creation

"Deep in the Forest"   I made this for The Family Place's 13th annual Gingerbread Festival.  There was a peoples' choice vote and I was third place (adult catagory).  The big blue mushroom is about 15 inches or so tall, and the scene is all edible except for the base it sits on.  These photos are the morning before the festival before I transported it over.

I'm totally hooked!  I'm already planning next year's creation.  My friend Linda made the flowers and leaves which we dried on wax paper then I put them where I needed them later.

I got tired of making caps and stems for the smaller mushrroms and thought I'd try forming mushrrom shapes whole and cooking them.  Of course they collapsed as they cooked,  but they turned out to be perfect for the roof mushrooms.   There are little elf faces made out of marshmallows in the windows of the mushroom stem and hiding in the shrubery behind the little house.

I tried too make even the back side pretty, and I put some candy way up high under the cap.

This is the first thing I've ever made from gingerbread and royal icing.  By the time I got to the butterfly, I'd finally gotten good at the icing!  

Thanks for looking!