Gingerbread Train

I cannot believe it's mid December already, seriously how did that happen?!  

So the countdown to Christmas is on and I've been bitten with the Christmas bug this year! Yes, I am one of those people I would normally roll my eyes at who already had their Christmas tree up and decorated before December even began (in all fairness though, the tree was put up on 30 November, so I wasn't that bad)! And if there was a Christmas Tree Ornaments Anonymous, I would be there.  The amount of money that I've spent buying Christmas ornaments this year is phenomenal.  At around $4 a pop, I'm too frightened to even want to know how much this year's Christmas tree cost me!

So with all the must-do's out of the way, all that was left, in Christmas readiness this year, was bake!  And bake I did!

I half regretted last year not embarking on some crazy Christmas themed project - the scars from the year before were still raw!  The scars have fully healed now and I couldn't wait to get started on this gingerbread train.  Little girl loves trains, she is absolutely obsessed with them so I couldn't wait to see her reaction when this was all done! 

So the first thing I had to do was to get the paper cuts ready.  This took a bit of brainstorming, I mean, I didn't want just square and rectangle structures.  I needed a cylinder for the front carriage and something cone shaped for the chimney.  

I ended up using a metal cylinder mold which I covered in foil and then wrapped the gingerbread around. And for the chimney, I used one of my metal piping tips and did the same thing as the cylinder.  Once the gingerbread was baked, I gently removed the gingerbread from the molds and voila, you have all these wonderful shapes to play with instead of just squares and rectangles.

I wanted each carriage to look like a sleigh and used candy canes as the bar handles.  As you can see, this is one "girly" train, with all the pink, the red and the love hearts! My kind of train!

 A pic of the back of each sleigh carriage - love hearts galore!

   Love heart candy canes

  Love heart train stop

These freckles are meant to be mushroom stools.  C came up with this idea many years ago and I can't help but use it in all my gingerbread structures - they're just so damn cute!

Chocolate sticks train tracks

And finally, the train wouldn't be complete without a conductor! Little Organics kindly gave me a bag filled with goodies including a box of mini gingerbread men for little girl.  I stole a few to decorate the train with! 

So all that is left to do is dig in! Because I baked this gingerbread to eat (as opposed to previous years which was more for looks), the gingerbread is quite soft, which means that the structural integrity has been compromised a little! Each carriage is supported by the wheels alone and I've already had 4 of the wheels break in half on me! Luckily I had two spare, so I could easily replace them, but then when the last 2 broke, I had no choice but to glue them together and stick a love heart on and hope for the best!  Well, the train hasn't collapsed yet, so fingers crossed!

Little girl has already stolen a few lollies from the carriages!