Gingerbread Baby Blender

This winter I built a baby blender from gingerbread. The dough is very soft and it tends to crack when I attempted to bend it for the turtle deck. It turned out to be much more challenging than anticipated. There were a couple problems that resulted from the fuselage being too long for the oven and pans. Instead of hot glue I used royal icing to fasten it all together. 

This is the fuselage all cut and laid out. I had to use two pans to fit it all. On the right side I used barbecue skewers to support the overhanging dough. As you can see that clearly didnt work. Before I baked it the dough was supported, but as it baked the dough seeped through the skewers. That ruined the rear part of the fuselage!

This is what the rear of the fuselage looked like. Clearly ruined I decided to just cut this part off and account for the shortened fuselage. It reminds me of bear claws. Some of the gingerbread fell between the skewers and caught on fire in the oven! 

It is now really short but that doesnt matter. It just means more frosting to hold the tail section together. Time to build the wings!

Both  wings are done now. They are just like the baby blenders but a bit smaller because gingerbread is very heavy and I didnt know if the plane could handle the full size. The gingerbread really rose when they baked which concerned me. The wings are about 1/4 inch thick which was not according to plan. I did not get a picture of the wing struts but they are the same as the baby blenders.

Time to start constructing the fuselage. This went suprisingly smooth compared to how the build had been going. I used alot of frosting and then braced it with two heavy glasses. I wanted to make sure it was strong enough to hold the wings so I used plenty of frosting.

Then i finished the fuselage and fastened it to the bottom wing. I made sure to have enough weight on the fuselage so it would form a strong bond to the wing.

Next the top wing and tail section were put on. I poured caramel into the struts to give them a cool look. The turtle deck was tricky because I had to bake the gingerbread first and it did not want to fold without cracking. With a lot of patience and burns I got the 300 degree gingerbread to sit happily on the formers. The gingerplane was so tail heavy at this point I needed to keep the glasses on the wings so it didnt tip over backwards. It was now completed but very ugly. It needed multiple pounds of candy and some floats to fix that.

That's better! I put floats on it because I didn't trust gingerbread wheels to hold up this 5 pound monstrosity. The water is actually caramelized sugar with blue food coloring. With all the candy on the plane I think it looks pretty good! 

Santa turned out to be a really good pilot!

All in all this build was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the whole process even with the setbacks. I encourage you to go and make a gingerbread plane because they are a lot of fun and if you mess up at least you can eat it. You can't do that with foamboard can you! I hope you liked it and I will make sure to post the video of me smashing this plane as is tradition in my family.