Sunday, July 31, 2011

Totally edible birthday card!

Leigh's brother is a joint owner of a local business which is celebrating it's 1st birthday in August. To celebrate, they're running a birthday card competition for their friends and customers and here is our entry...







It was Leigh's idea to make a completely edible birthday card - and I thought about this website and its 3D gingerbread houses, so we started thinking about how to make it with gingerbread. We did a practice run, which was a good job we did as there were lots of bits and pieces we were able to refine for the finished card.

So the final effort comprises 2 pieces of gingerbread (made using this recipe - but only half the quantity and that was still enough to make a practice card [about A5 size], the real card and a ton of gingerbread biscuits), one with a car shaped hole cut out of it (the shape of the business' logo). We also made sure we cut holes into the appropriate edges of the front and back so that they could be joined together with strawberry laces.



Leigh filled the car shape with melted mint boiled sweets to make a window - he did try making his own sugar syrup to hard crack stage, but it didn't come out as clear in tests!

Here's the rehearsal card with our own boiled sugar



(actually, looking at this photo, with the table behind the card the window doesn't look too bad. Take my word for it though, you could not see through it!)

And the final version with melted down minty sweets which is very clear, as you can see in the first photo above.



I iced a message on the front, and Zachary decorated with glitter. Inside, we used edible paper to colour and cut out a heart shape and the initial letters of our names (Leo helped to press the shapes of the letters into the paper for easy cutting out!).

Now just need to wait and see how the competition goes...

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