Animal Carousel

A Finnish tabloid had a contest titled "Paras pipari" (best gingerbread) and when I saw it I knew I would have to participate. Perhaps not such a good idea when you have CFS and struggle to take care of yourself. The other parts weren't that straining, but rolling the dough is very exhausting. And decorating wasn't so easy with the problems I have with coordination and motoric skills. Making the piece took about three weeks and cleaning up afterwards will probably take two more weeks. A few times I got way overexhausted and had to spend a lot of time resting in bed afterwards. The piece is also participating in DA's Gingerbread House contest.

Some random facts about the piece:

The carousel is designed by me and my SO planned the actual realization and did the necessary calculations.

There were about 1.75 kg of gingerbread dough and 700g of confectioner's sugar used in this piece, the amount of candy and cake decorations used can't really be measured, most of the candy I bought wasn't used in the end.

The diameter of the circle at the bottom is 28 cm.

The piece is put together with melted ordinary sugar like we tend to do in Finland. It can leave nasty trails of brown sugar, but it dries very quickly and holds together much better than royal icing.

The carousel includes six animals: an elephant, a camel, a leopard, a giraffe, a horse and a zebra. The last two are made with the same pattern. All of them were drawn by me.

There are little silver cake decoration spheres on the vertical seams of the cylinder to mimic the lightbulbs of the carousel we have at the Linnanmäki amusement park here in Helsinki.

The cake decoration stars at the top stick there because the ceiling has been brushed with a watered down version of the icing.

The little rectangles surrounding the bottom aren't bubble gum but candy.

In the end I donated the piece to the psychiatric unit of Lastenlinna, a children's hospital here in Helsinki. The leopard broke a leg on the way (I had the piece in my lap in a huge plastic bag, but other than that it was still fine when it got there. I hope the kids like it.

I can probably upload the pictures you can use to build a similar carousel, but it will take some time as they exist only in paper at the moment (and hopefully I haven't lost any of them).