3D
Gingerbread Cookies

3D-New-Year's Firework Spheres
Two half-sphere gingerbread cookies glued together and dipped into flood consistency royal icing, then hand-painted and overpiped. These are not only enjoyable to make, but fun for kids to eat, too, as they are filled with candy :).
Am only showing you the front here, as they have identifiable personalized backsides.

Mr. Badger
Yeah, I must admit: This is the 3D gingerbread cookie I'm most proud of.
That's why I cover him in a section of his own.
There you can see him from other angles and view some progress images of how I piped and assembled his sweater.

Really small 3D gingerbread cookies are cute gifts. I made this mushroom cottage for a little friend's birthday, who loves the taste of gingerbread as much as I do. Her parents are not fond of too much sugar in her diet, though, so I made the house small with only a few royal icing decorations. Anyway, I'll consider making a free video on how to create a small cottage similar to this, if I get enough requests for it. So if you'd be interested, let me know.

The Back of this Little 3D Gingerbread Cookie
For the roof I shaped some aluminum foil and placed a circular cookie on top of it.
The body of the house, of course, is composed of two half-spheres, which I painted with titanium dioxide (TiO2; used in candy making, toothpastes, etc.) before putting them into the oven. The heart-shaped windows were cut out before baking and then filled with isomalt afterward.

Vali's Crooked Little Mushroom House
This image shows the slant of the mushroom cottage a bit better. To give it more interest, I baked the ground cookie a bit wavy as well :).
The heart-shaped windows were cut out before baking and then filled with isomalt afterward.

The Mushroom House and Its Wrought Iron Balcony
The wrought iron balcony broke twice on me when I tried to attach it to the house. So I finally piped it over isomalt to give it enough strength.
The windows, some of the plant stems, the weather rooster on the roof, and the little tree, too, are made of isomalt.

The Mushroom House's Outdoor Oven
An outdoor oven has many advantages: no smoke in the house and the heat can escape to the outside on a hot summer day. Open the indoor vents in winter, and you get a cozy little gingerbread home.
Royal icing and isomalt are wonderful mediums to decorate cookies of all sort, but taking them 3D is special :).
Let's see whether we can bake some pizza and bread... or how about some yummy gingerbread cookies?

Mushroom House Front Door
A small cobblestone path leads from the front door down to the outdoor oven and the flower garden. But the wall and the plants on it are obstructing its view.
Those elves sure have a green thumb and know how to keep a landscape all tidy, though.

The Lights are on in the Mushroom House
When I constructed this little house, I provided for it to be lit from the inside, but never added a light.
Then my mom fell in love with it. I put it under a glass bell for her, and added some led lighting which is cool enough to not melt the isomalt windows. This sugar substitute is heat resistant up to 140 deg Celsius.
To adhere the bell to the wood, I enlarged the lawn part and added some grassy dots on the outside. During this work, I managed to knock off and break the weather rooster on the roof, so I made a new one.

 This is a mostly free-form 3D gingerbread cookie, where the different sides have been baked over modeled/formed aluminum foil, except for the front and back, as they are straight. The windows are made of gelatin sheets. This was decorated during my pre-isomalt times :).

Entrance to the Crooked Little House
A crooked little house covered with a knitted blanket of snow.
With its height of about 18cm, this is a rather small home, just fit for a little dwarf. Can you see the tiny hat and shoes he took off in front of the door after shoveling the snow off of his entranceway and splitting wood for his fireplace?

Back of the Crooked Little House
Here lives a laborious little dwarf. Let us help him split some wood while he is resting after a full day of work :).

Every Saturday during the rose season, our friend Gianna goes to the farmer's market where she buys rose heads on masse. I guess the farmers take them from those bushes that branch out too much and don't have nice and straight stems.
Anyway, she arranges them in low glass containers with a little water inside. I made her this gingerbread cookie box for her birthday, so she would have some roses to look at during off-season as well.

Gingerbread Star Box with Lid
The lid is decorated with a more vertical version of the Royal Icing Frilling Technique. The idea for a two-tone basket weave came from a patterned two-tone brick building. In one way or another, my mind seems to translate almost everything it sees into royal icing art ;-).

Open Gingerbread Star Box
The box is made by stacking/gluing five star cookies with a round center cut out on top of each other. I guess it could have been made by gluing rectangles vertically as well, but this would have been more work and more trouble to arrange them exactly.

The Gingerbread Star Box from a Bird's-Eye View
It was quite challenging to pipe the royal icing lavender with leaves to the vertical inside wall of the box...

This 3D cookie is 20cm in diameter. It is decorated with fondant and royal icing. A little bit more info on it below...

Easter Basket Filled with Eggs
The Easter eggs are decorated with wet-on-wet roses, all in style with the basket's fabric liner. They also don a gilded floral eyelet lace and transfer butterflies. The wrapped handles of the wicker basket are free-formed gingerbread overpiped with royal icing.

Inside of the Easter Basket
The sides of the "fabric" liner was done in sections, by rotating the basket on its side and letting each section dry before moving to the next. This was, of course, done before the ruffles were attached to the sides.

The Easter Basket showing off its Frills
The frills on the basket liner were done with fondant and over piped with the royal icing wet-on-wet technique. This technique has to be done fast before the icing starts to dry. So I made small, doable sections.
The right end of a section was fitted underneath the left end of the next section. That left end was bent inward/under to make it look like a pleat. Done this way, one cannot see a start nor an end.

3D Basket Weave
The shape of this 3D gingerbread cookie was achieved by lining the outside of a small soup pan with aluminum foil and baking the cookie dough on top of it.
I then first covered the whole thing with royal icing to seal the cookie and make it sturdier, before decorating it with the basket weave.