For Full, Commented Gallery, check out my website: pictures of constuction with descriptions here.

UPDATE 04/27/05: OK, so I looked into it . . . it turns out that IE reads certain script attributes in very . . . unique ways. The galleries are now fixed and should work with any browser. Sorry for the confusion!

I first read The Lord of the Rings in first grade, and became immediately enamoured of the universe Tolkien had created. I have since read the books about 13 times, and have done numerous little projects based thereupon.

But when the movies came out, my sister (also a long-time fan) and I were inspired to do an even bigger project. Every Christmas, we make a gingerbread house, and every year it gets more complex. Why not do gingerbread models of various sites in Middle Earth?

So we did. Chrismas 2003 was a hobbit hole (not yet galleried on my site, I'll get it up eventually and post it here), and Christmas 2004 was the Golden Hall at Edoras.

We have fairly strict rules for what we use in the houses:
-First, all materials must be edible - no structural supports, paints, or anything else that isn't food. Although the gingerbread recipe we use is kinda . . . hard to eat in the thicknesses we use.
-Second, no food coloring. This is too easy - so we make our own dyes from drink mixes and other colored components.
-Third, durability - we make these things to last for at least a year. At this point, the edibility constraint is kinda silly, because we wouldn't want to eat something that's been sitting out for that long, but we maintain it nonetheless.
-Fourth, no shortcuts - anything that can reasonably be modelled, is. No painting on bricks - they have to be part of the structure. No drawing cobblestones or etching them into the surface -- they had better be hand-laid. Decorative vines are actual, independently-cut tendrils applied to the outside of buildings. Windows are not open holes - they are clear sugar crystal.
-Four-B - except in special cases, no pre-designed edible objects. Ie, that candy tree? no go. This is more of a quality concern than anything else - stuff we make looks better. I've seen fences made of chocolate with a fence pattern on one side . . . Nuh-uh. I hand-wove licorice into a wickerwork fence for the hobbit hole. We make our own icing in several varieties, developed for different construction tasks over the years. We go obsessive-compulsive style.

I can't think of any other formal rules, but we have a number of little customs we've developed over the years as well.

The above pictures show the completed house, and a commented gallery detailing the construction process (which took over 75 man-hours) and final product can be found on my website, here, as mentioned above.

I'll eventually set up a compact html+pics only micro-site for this and include it as a zipped download. Until then, check out the site.

Some details about this one:
Stone Tiles: moravian spice cookies hand-cut and hand-laid, with icing was for stone color.
Golden Star: moravian spice cookie hand-cut, painted with thick icing using a needle, attached with fast-drying icing.
Doors, walls, rooves, facade: gingerbread - 3 batches, assembled with both extra-tacky and fast-drying icing.
Thatch: shredded wheat half-blocks, meshed with fragments and loose strands. One half is better aligned than the other.
Vines, garlands, etc: hand-assembled from various flat and stranded candy, using extra-tacky icing formula and heated, kneaded candy as adhesive.
Roof shutters: painted on (grimace . . . we couldn't find suitably strong thin material) in three layers, with brush and pins.
Flames: several gummy candy types cut and combined for color.