School project- Gingerbread Castle

My daughter comes home from school right before Christmas break with an assignment for a school project.  We have over a month to complete the project so we decide that we will get through Christmas first and then dive into it.  Her assignment is to look up the history, write a report, draw an outline, and build a replica of a castle.  She is very excited and full of great ideas. 
Her first thought is to make a cake so that all her classmates can eat it!  After much discussion on alternative ways to build the castle, we finally decide that we will make it out of gingerbread.  I commit myself to the baking of the gingerbread and my husband takes the task of the construction with Kendall's help of course.
We start by doing a little research and let me tell you- there are alot of talented people out there!  I was impressed with all the tips.  Larry made my templates and I spent a day and a half baking and mixing "royal icing" http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/royal-icing-i/Detail.aspx which is the glue to hold it all together. 

I had seen that someone used round pampered chef tubes to make a rounded edge, so I gave it a try but this did not work out so well for me.  We went with plan B using gift wrap rolls as our corner towers.  So, technically we would be disqualified in an official gingerbread house building contest.  Good thing we werent trying to win any awards, just making a fun school project!

First wall up, supervised and constructed by Daddy.  We were a bit nervous that the royal icing would not hold it together but it did just fine! 

We covered the cardboard with green painters tape to make it look like grass.  The area surrounding the castle was water, so we used blue fruit rollups to serve as the water.  Kendall enjoyed putting the finishing details with the water in the well in the courtyard, sweettarts as handles for the door and goldfish swimming in the moat.

Finished product: Bodiam Castle aka Kendall's Castle