THE GINGERBREAD SHIP

Life has been a bit of a tumultuous journey the last few years, but recently after a job change and moving into a new home I feel I’ve finally come to some calmer seas - which is why for 2021’s gingerbread creation I’ve decided to create a gingerbread ship over on a calm sugar glass sea over a candy coral reef!

Non-Edible Structure

I bought a 30” wood tabletop online and got a 1/2” steel pipe with threaded ends that I could attach to steel mounting plates. I then recycled styrofoam by ripping it up and creating an organic-looking ocean floor.

Styrofoam is great for an interesting edible landscape because you can easily pin objects (like fish and coral) to the styrofoam. To give it that aquamarine look I painted it with blue acrylic paint - styrofoam cannot be spray painted because it will disintegrate.

The Water

For the water, I opted for a plastic wafer with a thin layer of blue royal frosting covering it.

Technically you could make an isomalt plate that is so thick that it would be strong enough to hold itself up - but that amount of isomalt would easily cost hundreds of dollars and I also wanted to include some lighting to illuminate the coral reef below, which would be extremely difficult to attach to isomalt without breaking it.

The Coral Reef

For a sandy base of the reef I used raw cane sugar from Trader Joe’s.

For the different varieties of brain coral and anemones were made out of various colors of Royal frosting with different piping tips. The shells and starfish scattered about were made by pressing fondant into molds.

Some of the taller more branch like corals were made out of chocolate and sugar that I heated up and poured out on a piece of tin foil in a abstract Jackson Polluck-esque style in order to get long stringy pieces that I could then stab into the blue foam base.

There are so many nautical themed candies in the world that this theme was pretty fun to achieve! We had a lot of fun populating the reef with gummy fish, turtles, and sharks!

My back was really spasming while working on this project - had to keep taking stretch breaks!

For the Ship

I first created a cardboard model to get the shapes of gingerbread I needed to bake and to provide support for the gingerbread. Three wood dowels with longer BBQ skewers created the masts of the ship.

You can bake gingerbread that isn’t flat easily by creating a tinfoil form, spraying it with liberal amounts of cooking spray, and laying the gingerbread dough over it. But I opted to make panels for the sides of this ship, which meant I didn’t need to make as many curved pieces.

On the stern (back end) of the ship, I made gingerbread panels with sugar glass windows. LED lights on the inside of the ship illuminated the windows, giving a lovely amber glow.

For the sails, I threaded marshmallows onto skewers and piped chocolate frosting onto them in a draped pattern. I wanted the ship’s sails to be folded up, to symbolize how we had finally arrived at calmer seas and were having a moment of rest and stillness.

For the “crow’s nest” at the top of mast, I used an edible espresso cup that my boyfriend’s dad gave me as a gift for Hanukkah!