A Pony Kind of Gingerbread · 7:02pm Dec 25th, 2023
First of all, Merry Christmas, Festive Hearth's Warming, and Happy Holidays to all!
As some people may know, I'm rather fond of gingerbread. Specifically the design and construction of gingerbread houses. It's one of my more passionate hobbies, if a somewhat seasonal one.
This year I decided to tackle a new challenge (while trying a variety of new techniques, tricks, and recipe variants) in order to bring to life a classic structure from the hallowed halls of My Little Pony fandom.
So step right this way, for a brief guided tour... of the Rainbow Factory.
Welcome, special guests and honored investors, to the Cloudsdale Weather Corporation's one and only Rainbow Factory! The central hub for weather production and control in all Equestria! Step right this way and we'll get started with the tour!
Here, you can see the exterior of our factory. Constructed of of only the finest materials for the most important building in Cloudsdale!
But as lovely as it is during the day, it is even more beautiful at night. Luckily, our manager was able to call in a favor with Princess Celestia herself to provide this early view.
Stunning, no? Now before we continue our tour indoors, let's take a closer look at that iconic sign.
Here you can see the heart of our operation: the legendary Pegasus Device, doing it's hardest to provide Equestria with only the purest Spectra. See to your right where it flows through magically conductive channels elsewhere in the facility.
And here's out illustrious Facilities Supervisor. Looks like she's hard at work! Best leave her to it.
And here we have... oh dear. It looks like some little filly left the tour group. Nothing to see here folks! Move along!
Moving on. To your left, you'll see where waste product is removed from the facility. Got to keep the factory floors clean!
The Spectra production process creates quite a quantity of nasty impure byproducts that must be disposed of and... wait a moment... what's that?
Oh dear, it looks like we have another filly lost in the factory. She must have come to visit her friend.
But there's no need to panic. After all...
- ...there's cookies and punch by the door.
And there you have it! My gingerbread creation for the year (not counting the recreation of Animal Farm I made just after Thanksgiving for a contest). There are some things I'd like to go back and change, given what I learned in the process of making it, and quite a few points that I feel could have been decorated better, but overall it was a fun process and I enjoyed the time spent making it. Which is really the goal, I suppose, for creations like this that are inherently temporary. In a few weeks, the Factory will be gone, eaten either by me or by the local wildlife. But these pictures and the memories will remain. And my copious notes on what not to do next time.
So my holiday wish for you all is to find something to do that makes you happy, even if it won't leave a permanent mark.
As a final parting, here's a few more images that I couldn't work into the narrative:
(Also, aside from the cardboard base, the electric wires, and Thrackerzod's lollipop balloons, this is 100% completely edible. The ponies themselves are made of chocolate!)
Horrifying and yet delicious! I love the coloured windows, sugar glass?
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Thanks! And close, but not quite. Just melted hard candies. I intended for them all to be a single color, but as it turned out, the candy I'd had selected for the task had an unexpected gooey center which made them unsuitable for the role.
This is incredible!
This is beyond insanity
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Ooh, an excellent solution. I did that for cookies once, but when someone nearly chipped a tooth I decided not to repeat the attempt. ^^;
Imagine a Rainbow Factory/Cupcakes crossover, where non optimal foals are professionally butchered and turned into tasty baked treats to keep up with Equestria's food demand.
That be most deliciously macabre of a shout to such an infamous location of Equestria, right down the sugary detailed machinery and nods to the factory's horrors, well done!
I was already dying of laughter and then the cookies and punch by the door
I can't
A marvelously delicious masterpiece. I haven't read "Rainbow Factory" yet (which means, no spoilers, well, not more spoilers than what I probably caught by looking at this), but I get a few of the references. Nice work!
This is nuts, well done!
"It's just red dye No. 5, I swear!"
That looks like it took a lot of work. Glad to see the final product! Merry Christmas!
Amazing job!