Nibble Nibble Little Mouse, Who Is Nibbling On My House? $15,000 Gingerbread House.

The Edible Gingerbread Playhouse by Dylan's Candy Bar is one of the more outrageous gifts in this year's Neiman Marcus Christmas Book. The full-sized playhouse stands 6.6 feet tall by 5.25 feet wide and 4.1 feet deep.

It's handcrafted with 381 pounds of gingerbread and 517 pounds of icing and includes giant cookies, lollipops, gummies, mints, gumdrops, and a candy-encrusted roof. There's even a lollipop tree inside.



CEO and self-proclaimed Candy Queen Dylan Lauren (daughter of fashion legend Ralph Lauren) was inspired as a child when she watched the classic movie Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. With Dylan's Candy Bar locations throughout the nation, she's made all our dreams come true.

Edible Gingerbread Playhouse by Dylan's Candy Bar
Price $15,000.00

For all the delectable details, call 1.877.9NM.GIFT.

Crack Up At The Crandall Family Christmas Cards.

above: In 2005, the Crandall family sent out their own version of the childrens' book, Pat The Bunny

Meet a family whose yearly Christmas Cards are way better than yours. Not only are these people better looking than your family, but they are far more clever, too. Before you scoff and think to yourself "Well, you haven't seen our family Christmas cards," I don't have to. Read the post and you'll see that I'm right.

Court Crandall is a talented creative director, screenwriter, author, father and beer league hockey player and someone I worked with too many years ago to put in print.

Each year Court, along with his equal parts stunning and smart wife Denise and their two handsome sons who don soap opera hunk names Chase and Zane, poke fun of themselves in their annual holiday cards. Nothing and no one is sacred as they mock everything from menopause to puberty to the Yankees. What a nice and welcome change from the family Christmas cards that take themselves seriously or worse, pretentiously. The fact that they come from this disgustingly good looking, trim and tanned family makes one like them even more.


above: Court and Denise at their 1992 nuptials

I wouldn't dare attempt to re-word Court's award winning prose, so I will simply reproduce his blog post here for you with the images of their family Christmas cards for the past 17 years so you can enjoy these hilarious annual greetings from the Crandall Family. Perhaps these will inspire you to move away from matching sweaters and frozen smiles in your next family Christmas card.

The text below is taken directly from the blog Holding Court and is written in the first person voice of Court Crandall:

This is probably the longest running campaign I’ve ever been a part of. It started just after my wife, Denise, and I got married in 1992. I had been in California for two years and wanted a way to punk my friends back in Boston. So, for our first Christmas together, we sent out a holiday card that showed us rollerblading our tree home. (Something we actually did by the way, because I was driving a, um, Miata. Trust me, it was super cool back then. Super.)



As we got older, life graciously provided us with a number of props: A new house, two children, a cat, a dog and a fake nanny to name a few. Sometimes these accessories worked. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they needed to use the litter box in the middle of the shoot. Regardless, there have always been plenty of stories that went along with the shooting of the annual Christmas card. Most of which involve one or both boys misbehaving, my wife getting frustrated to the point of tears and all of us riding home in silence. Typically, to some song on the car radio like “We are Family” that accentuated what a disappointment we are as a family unit.

Then there’s the fulfillment process, which Denise runs like a Nike factory in rural Malaysia. Each family member gets a pile of envelopes, a stack of labels and whatever saliva you can muster to seal roughly … nine hundred thousand invitations. You see, due to the card’s increased popularity over the years, numerous people have requested to be added to the mailing list — a list that now includes family members, friends, folks I know but don’t particularly care for, complete strangers and the guy who owns the Indian restaurant down the street.

That said, with time, our sons have come to not only endure but embrace the annual Christmas card tradition. And they’ve learned that, while humiliating, being dressed in togas, having fake pubic hair applied to their face and Hershey’s chocolate coagulating in their ears, are small prices to pay for getting attention from chicks at school a week later.

There are 18 years of cards in all. While I like some more than others, the thing I’m most proud of, is that all four of the people who are featured throughout are healthy, we’re all still together and not a day goes by that we don’t share at least one really good laugh.

2010:


I hope you enjoy the latest submission (shown above). I hope you have a great holiday with the folks you love most. And I hope that with time, the chocolate smell in my wife’s car will dissipate.

Previous Crandall Family Christmas Cards:

2009:

2008:

2007:

2006:

2005:






2004:

2003:

2002:

2001:

2000:

1999:

1998:

1997:

1996:

1995:

1994:

1993:

all images reproduced with permission from the Crandall Family

I look forward to their cards to come and I bet you do now, too.

Merry Christmas!

Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water Reproduced In Gingerbread. Incredible Edible Architecture.

Fellow blogger Melodie blew me away with her version of Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Fallingwater home reproduced in gingerbread. Given that she graduated from BYU in Landscape Management a few years ago and more recently from MATC's Culinary School, it does give her the perfect credentials for such a feat.





Melodie began the blog Garden Melodies because she adores flowers and is hoping to expand into cake baking and catering. From the looks of this masterpiece - created with her friend Brenton for entry in the 2010 Gingerbread Festival in Orem, Utah - many people will be hoping she starts her cake business soon!






all images courtesy of Garden Melodies

Model Statistics:
• It took over 12 hours to design
• It took Brenton and Melodie around 40 hours to build and decorate
• There are around 164 different pieces of gingerbread
• It took roughly 12 square feet of gingerbread dough (that’s four large batches) to make all the walls, floors and roof
• Over 8 bags of powdered sugar were used to make all the frosting
• It took over 40 sleeves of large Smarties which are used to simulate dry stack stone on the building exterior
• The river and water fall are made up of three batches of hard candy

Best gingerbread house cookie recipe (according to Melodie):
2 Cups light corn syrup
1 1/2 Cups packed brown sugar
1 1/4 Cups margarine
1 teaspoon salt
9 Cups flour

Melt together the corn syrup, brown sugar, and margarine. Mix till smooth then add in flour and salt. Bake for 15 to 20 min at 350 degrees.


Unfortunately Melodie lost out to the entry Candyland (below) at this years' Gingerbread House Festival:

above image courtesy of the Grierson Family blog

Want some pretty flowers or a fabulous cake? Or simply to congratulate her on this masterpiece? Melodie can be reached at garden.melodies@gmail.com.