Our Third Gingerbread House Competition

This year the annual gingerbread competition at the Franklin Park Conservatory had a different twist.  All the gingerbread houses were supposed to go "green."  After careful consideration, we came up with the idea of a solar-powered penguin igloo.  And then we made lots of gingerbread.



We also made a colony of penguins from fondant.



Oh, and a polar bear, too.

After consulting the internets, we decided to build our igloo form over a bowl to get the proper shape.  It turned out to be a really great technique.



While waiting for the icing to dry so that the ingloo would be firm, we ate some gingerbread cookies.

And then we put it all together:




We also thought it would be cute if the penguins were mailing their letters to Santa.  There is a line at the mailbox.



To:  Santa, North Pole

From:  The Penguins, South Pole

Dear Santa,

We have been very good this year.  We even installed solar panels on our igloo!

Love,

The Pengins


Meet some of our other penguin friends.  Here is Tacky the Penguin.  He is a little bit different from the rest, but he likes to play with his big red rubber ball.

Here is Grandpa Penguin.  He has a huge schnoz.



And this guy is in charge of the solar panel installation.

We entered our gingerbread house in the family category, because we all helped make it.  Kevin even got to use power tools at one point, when we needed a hole drilled in the bottom of the gingerbread mailbox so that we could mount it on top of a candy cane pole. 

Here's hoping we win!

P.S.  Remember last year when we built a gingerbread rocket?