Canterlot

So, this is a gigantic rice crispy-gingerbread-graham cracker...thing of Canterlot.  Last year, we made Ponyville (see Liebatron's page for pictures of that).  When we put that on Equestria Daily, people told us to do Canterlot.  At that point in time we were thinking "yeah right, that would be ridiculous."  As time went on though it became more and more tempting to take on something so absurd.  If we could get all the cantilevers to work, how awesome would that be?  Thus, Canterlot, the confectionery version, was born.

It took us about two months to put together.  The first thing we had to do was convert reference material into an actual floor plan with real forms.  If you've ever looked at Canterlot in detail, you'll notice that there are a number of impossible shapes, so converting it into something that made sense in a 3D world was challenging.  Also, there's only one perspective of Canterlot that's really available to work from (maybe two if you count Canterlot without the castle and Canterlot with the castle).

The other part was actually putting it together.  For Ponyville, we'd used almost exclusively rice crispy treats.  We had to come up with some new tricks this time around, as we had things leaning off the edges of other things.  Also, we decided from the start that we'd only use edible stuff to build our creation - no toothpicks allowed, unlike last year.  The mountain was mostly rice crispy treats, plus some pretzel sticks to act as a sort of ribar.  For the buildings, we used a special "gingerbread" recipe that baked into a real strong sort of cookie, along with rice crispy treats and caramel glue.  For areas that needed light-weight construction (such as the left-most tower), we used graham crackers and ice cream cones glued together with caramel.  Some small things (such as the stars adorning the tops of the buildings) were made with fondant.  We had to redo a number of the buildings after our first attempts to make them failed to stand up on their own.

I have no idea how many boxes of cereal and bags of marshmallows we went through and I'm really not sure I want to know, it was way more than is considered sane, I know that much.  We also produced a ton of icing.  We didn't apply all of the icing at once, so some of the colors have run, but for now it still looks pretty good, and boy are we all happy that it's finished!

Credit to my mom, myself, Liebatron, two college friends of mine, and my little sister for helping out with this.

Also, see if you can find Rarity.