Display a Chocolate Cottage

" These cute chocolate houses wouldn't be nearly as much fun without all the whimsical curve appeal. I downloaded the template on how to make this chocolate house from bhg.com, and then I decorated it a little bit. So now, I'm ready to add all of my fun accessories that will make my village come alive. So let's start with the trees because who doesn't love a little landscaping? So I've got some ice cream cones here, and I've got some melted white chocolate, and using a pastry brush, I'm just gonna kind of paint on some chocolate unto my cone. This is like a coarse sugar that just happens to be green, and this is gonna give us a real sort of evergreen texture. And because no chocolate house would be complete without a little chocolate fence, here's how you do it. You start out with some Pretzels, and you're gonna dip these into some warm dark chocolate, and then you're lay them down on a piece of wax paper like this. You want to make sure that they're touching each other, and you wanna alternate them one up one down like that. Then while they're still wet, you put a little bit of sprinkles on them to give them a little festive flare, [unk] so when it comes time to install your fence, what you're gonna do is just run a nice thin bead of royal icing right onto your stand, and then you put your fence right in there, and that will dry nice and hard and sturdy, that fence isn't going anywhere. And now, the final touch to our chocolate town are these adorable little marshmallow men, and they're super easy to make. So, I'm gonna start out with 2 marshmallows. I'm gonna have 1 that's whole, and then I'm actually gonna snip 1 marshmallow about two-thirds of the way down to make a little head. And you can see, when you snip it, you kinda have this sticky part here. That's perfect because you just stick it right onto your bottom marshmallow, and you've got a head and a body. How cute is that? So now, to give them some little legs or give them a little interest there at the bottom, I'm just gonna dip my snowman, my marshmallow snowman, into some white chocolate, and then I'm just gonna dip him into some sprinkles like this. So now he's got his little head and his little body, and of course, he needs some eyes, and maybe like a little couple of buttons on this jacket. So for his eyes, I'm actually using some dark chocolate that I've warmed up. And I'm going to use the back part of my paintbrush, get a little bit of chocolate, and just put on his eyes. There's 1 and there is 2. I'm gonna need some buttons on his chest, maybe 1 there. So now, how about a nose for our little marshmallow man? And I thought it would be really cute if we did like a nice little, nice big nose on his face. Super cute. So for that, I'm just gonna take some of my white chocolate that's still warm, and I'm just gonna dab a bit right there to put his nose on, and I'll just stick a little candy-coated chocolate right on there to make his little nose, and I'm just gonna put a dab on the side. I'll just have it like that and stick on a little earmuff. So now, he needs some arms, right? So for that, I've got these Pretzel sticks here, and I'm gonna cut it about three quarters the way down like that, get another one, and kind of cut them about the same length, and then I'm just gonna stick these right into his sides like that. And there we go. So now, you can either stick him on a little sled like that, by just using a piece of a Graham cracker. All of these projects are simple enough to get the whole family involved. But you know what? You're not just building a village, you're building some really happy memories. So happy holidays, and have fun."