Gingerbread sailboat

This year for my gingerbread creation I tried a gingerbread boat. Not perfection by any means but pretty and I enjoyed the details. 

This is the finished gingerbread sailboat.

This is the sailboat before I added the spinnaker 

Another view of the final product 

Close up of Santa. Hat is supposed to look like a Mt Gay Red Hat.

Things I learned along the way. 

1. Shellacking the whole gingerbread in a fiberglass of royal icing is great but brittle. It allowed me to get it so that the boat had the right shape.

2. This was my first time working with modeling chocolate. Santa, Dasher, and Rudolf even the main sail are all made of modeling chocolate. I'm clearly not a great sculptor but the limitation seemed to be my artistic ability not the medium itself.  Ideally I would have done a better proportions for Santa vs Reindeer but it worked well. Modeling chocolate is easy to work with once it warms up to room temp and you can mix in colors. I learned that if it was getting too warm to put the whole thing in the freezer for a few minutes and it would be easier. The creation stiffens up when you stop working with it and dries out well. 

3. Mast and boom. By taking one big candy cane and one little one and cutting off the hooks I made the mast and boom. I took the smaller candycane and held the end I was attaching to to boom in the flame of my gas stove for a second and it melted and became like a blob of liquid on the end. I immediatly pressed it into the other candycane firmly and held it there and then allowed it to completely cool. This worked very well for structure.