“Fifth time’s the charm,” she said and slid the pan into the oven. “If this works, we can find other tubes and make towers of different sizes.”
“Is there a limit on what supplies we take in? Will it alter our choices?”
“It should be easy to gather and include everything we need. The contest supplies the ingredients. Or most of them. I’ll be bringing my special spice mix and additional candies. We can take twenty paper or cardboard template shapes, five pounds of candy, any food coloring we need and no more than a dozen cookie cutters. Oh, and we can bring up to ten shaping tools. I have a set of clay tools, new of course, for painting details in the icing. We’ll just carve what we want.”
“Five pounds is a lot of candy. What about structural support?”
“All structures must be edible. But I’ve found a work around for that. If we need extra support for tall items, like our second floor, we can build them up with cookies. I’ve checked with the judges, and this bad boy,” she brandished a cutter that cut a dozen one and half inch, circular cookies all at once, “counts as one cutter. We can make and stack the small cookies, held together with layers of icing, to support the second level. All nice and legal.”
“You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?”
“I did. I came in third last year. I’m proud of that, but I want to win this year. I’ve been planning and sketching all year. First place last year was the bakery over on Seventy Fifth. I can’t let them win this year, especially since their cookies aren’t as good as mine. They just blew my design out of the water.”
“Was theirs that great, or was yours not up to snuff?”
“A bit of both. I played it safe. It was my first contest. My house was lovely, just too small and not enough wow factor.”
“Looking at your designs, we’ll wow them this year for sure.”
“I hope so.” She couldn’t even express how badly she wanted to regain her grandmother’s lost title. Especially since she was certain the other bakery’s owner was sending her staff in to buy gingerbread men. Probably trying to duplicate Poppy’s recipe.
