We are having a gingerbread contest. My idea was to make Santa at the beach! How ever I'm having problems with the palm trees. Everything has to be edible, therefore I can not use any wires to make my palm trees stand up. We have a flat surface to attach the house and everything to, so I can not stick a pretzel into a cake or something. I'm at lost on how to make a palm tree that will stand up and fully edible. Please please give me any ideas you have!!

Ok, this might work but it may not travel well. Can you assemble your palm tree on site?

If so, here goes.

Okay, ahead of time (so there are ample days for drying) take gumpaste and form your trunk. If you want to beef up the internal structure, use some uncooked spegetti sticks (or is that not allowed?).

Then, on top of your truck, form a ball so you have something to attach your leaves to (make the ball the same color as your leaves so it blends in between them).

Also, with gum paste, roll thin leaves and make little cuts along the sides at an angle with an exacto knife. Let these leaves dry on something that give them a slight curve so they will hang downward when attached to the ball portion.

Then, when you get to your venue, set up your cake, take some melted chocolate, put a blob where you want to attach the trunk to your cake board and put it on. (Also, if you are using brown sugar for "sand" you could sort of pack it around the base to cover any excess chocolate and lend extra support).

Let it dry a little and then use either royal icing or melted chocolate again to attach your leaves to the ball and let dry.

You may want to bring a can of air too so you can spray it as you attach things. Just be careful not to blow off pieces already attached LOL.

I'm not sure how big this thing has to be, so hopefully you can make something work.

Also, just FYI on the palm leaves, if they don't need to be too big, you can use a holly leaf cutter, cut them out, roll them a little thinner yet to stretch them into a longer leaf and then make the slits. See my Dora cake for examples, that's how I made those leaves. Best of luck. Post pics!

I would look for those round cookie sticks and use that as the truck. You could glue it to the board with royal icing or candy melts to make it look like a pipe of snow around it?

why not make the palm trees 3-d? I've seen stand up gingerbread cookies aht are made with "slots" that the baked cookies slide into to make them stand up. Either that or use royal icing to "glue" the trunk cookie pieces together.

I agree. Round cookie sticks for the tree trunk and attach to board with melted chocolate. I made a jungle cake once and used round cookie sticks. At my grocery store I found them with the candy instead of in the cookie isle. They were chocolate covered and bumpy so they made great tree trunks.

I am "wasting" time on CC to avoid cleaning, reading this post while I am eating almond bark covered pretzel sticks leftover from a prior cake project. Thinking to myself that you can't use cookie sticks as they aren't edible. Munch, munch, read some more. Then voila! Use pretzel sticks for your palm tree trunk! You can get them thin and short or long and thick. Either would work depending on what size you needed. I used a microplane to help get the salt off and to sand down the high points and to make a flat end. You could cover the pretzel in chocolate almond bark and let it run down onto the flat surface. If you need extra "glue" you can put extra almond bark where you needed it to hold the trunk to the flat base, kind of let it run out like roots (I know you don't see the roots on palm trees but you could hide the flowing bark with sand). For my project I used extra bark to glue pretzels together, etc.

What? Cookie sticks are edible. They are made from cookies. They are made from a dough that has been rolled into a stick. Are you thinking about lollipop sticks?

How about pretzel sticks for the trunks and gumpaste leaves? You could make the leaves in advance and "glue" them on with white melted chocolate the same color as the leaves.

If you use the pretzel sticks or the filled stick cookies for structure, you can pipe over it with royal, making a pile of icing build up at base that can be sprinkled with the same 'sand' you'll be using for the island(the build up will help it stand on its' own once dry and you're ready to assemble). Prop trunk(s) up at desired angle to dry. Use wafer paper for palm fronds or extremely thin rolled gumpaste or royal icing stenciled fronds which have been allowed to dry.

what denetteb said...

Yeah, I read cookie stick and was thinking sucker stick instead, oops. And I have cleaned out by desk between then and now. Yay.