Gingerbread

A Mayan Temple, 2012

We're pretty health-conscious. Hence the sculpture of processed sugar.

Every year, Grandpa Mike gets carried away with elaborate gingerbread sculptures (read: 3 foot tall Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Space Needle, The Polar Express, Gaudi's Casa Battlo...). The oohs and ahhs of the neighbors are nice, but my sister and I have outgrown our base love of anything brightly colored and made out of sugar, so the eating the thing has lost its appeal. Not to mention that sometimes the hours our dad spends Dremmel-tooling slabs of gingerbread- while the rest of us chat or watch It's A Wonderful Life- cause us to roll eyes. So this year, we urged him to scale-down, and make something Aeli could easily decorate. (One year we did a pirate ship. You heard stuff like this from Dad: "And you gotta watch out here, 'cause the Crow's Nest is only supported by this beam down here and this frostinged toothpick.") So, in honor of the world not ending (or: a new cycle beginning) the Mayan Temple it was.

Aeli loved it.