Gingerbread Barn: Part VI

Animals, animals. The book whose directions I was following only decorated the front of the barnyard animals, but I finally decided to decorate both sides so that the gingerbread barn will look good from any direction, including the back.

It may not be obvious, but these animals are the same ones from yesterday, except that after they dried, I flipped them over and "painted" all over them a second time. This time, the udders of the cows aren't quite so bright, but it's pretty much the same thing as before.

I did the back side of the sheeps as well, although this time I didn't need to paint faces on them since the faces are on the other side.

The chickens I didn't redo on the back, but I did add an additional layer of icing just to reinforce the pieces. Remarkably, not a single one broke on me while getting them off the parchment paper.

I mixed up some coconut shavings with yellow food die to make hay, then glued some into the hayloft with icing, and set a chicken on top of the hay. Looks nice, I think! =)

Now it's time for a little landscaping. I mixed up some brown icing and laid it out more-or-less where I wanted to corral the animals.

Then I sprinkled the icing with cocoa powder. A nice, earthy texture, I think. *nodding*

Time to grow some grass! I took more coconut shavings and mixed it with green food coloring this time around. Presto! Grass!

I laid out green icing where the grass should be. (I probably should have made the green icing a bit greener than I did. Oh, well. *shrug*)

Then sprinkled the grass over it. I also pulled out flower-shaped sprinkles to dot the grass. Flowers are always a nice touch, don't you think? =)

Time to build a fence to keep all of the animals from running away! First I set up the posts with pretzel sticks.

Then follow with the beams across the posts.

Time to add the animals! This particular photo is the only one I took of the shovel, which is merely a bit of Black Jack gum attached to a pretzel piece. On a completely unrelated note, if you look very closely at the neck of the horse in this photo, you'll see a small crack. I accidentally dropped this fellow while I was standing on the hard, tiled ground. The head managed to stay on the horse--which rather surprised me, to tell you the truth, but it does suffer from that small crack, and if you shake the body, you can tell the only thing holding the head on are the thick layers of icing. I put this horse near the back of the barn so the crack in the neck wouldn't be as obvious. =)

And the barn is FINISHED!

Two horses, two cows, three sheep, 11 chickens (I didn't like the painting job I did on one of them, so I didn't use all 12), happily sharing a barn with a silo. Hope y'all enjoyed it! Now I have a kitchen I need to clean up.....