'Sweet Home'

My fairy tale, 'Sweet Home' came second in the national, Once Upon a Time ~ Modern Fairy Tale Competition.

I read it last night at a prize-giving event and, after some discussion on facebook, even managed to pronounce ganache correctly!

Here's a small extract of the story:

Sweet Home

... The old woman built her house around the stove. She dug out foundations with a shovel and filled the trenches with slow-baked slabs of salt dough and buckets of oozy sugar paste. She cooked thick gingerbread bricks and glazed them with glacé icing which set hard during the cool, wood-shaded evenings. Paper-thin slices of gelatine were latticed into windows, crisscrossed by steady chords of ganache. She constructed a roof out of Linzertorte squares and piped meringue along every join. The midday sun hardened the egg-white mortar into stiff, crispy peaks. When she had finished, she sat on her gingerbread porch modelling tiny flowers out of fondant. She dyed them using wild onion skins, beetroot and hollyhock petals and placed them in gingerbread window boxes.

It was only when the postman had to deliver a package addressed to The Gingerbread House using a postcode which indicated the wood at the margin of the village that people heard about what the old woman had done. People chatted about it in the Post Office, discussed it in the pub and then sauntered down the B road on the pretext of getting some fresh air.

            The gingerbread house was set back from the road by several hundred feet, but was just about visible from the path through the criss-cross of foliage and branches. A crowd gathered at the edge of the wood, their exclamations rising in a whip-swirl of disquiet...