Happy New Year, everyone! What better way to start 2018 than turning over a NEW LEAF (eh, get it?)

I’ve gotten in the habit of ending each year on lvl.1 Chef with a big project. Last year I recreated all the sweet train cars from the Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks which was a lot of fun even if it did take over a month to complete! This year, I put it to my followers on Twitter to choose between two gingerbread house projects and The Baroness von Bon Bon castle from Cuphead was beat out by this Animal Crossing room recreation.

For those unfamiliar with the Animal Crossing series, it’s a type of life simulator where the majority of your interaction with the villagers consist of doing favors and running errands. Often, the villagers will give you bells, the game’s currency, to use in paying off the loan for your home, but sometimes they’ll reward you with pieces of furniture, wallpaper, and flooring to decorate with. These items are sometimes based around themes like ‘modern’ or ‘cabana’ or in this case “sweets” and look really nice all put together.

So let’s see what we got here. I’ve definitely played my fair share of Animal Crossing, but I can’t say I’ve ever had the patience and determination to complete an entire furniture set! Luckily, there were several examples online so this is what I used for reference:

When planning out how I would recreate the room, I had to list each of the furniture pieces and determine what each component was likely made out of. Here’s the list I came up with:

• Bed – strawberry shortcake with wafer head board and strawberry pillows
• Dresser and Wardrobe – chocolate bars (these were the easy ones!)
• Bookshelf – wafers and gumdrop books
• Sofa – strawberry roll cake and vanilla roll cake with caramel filling
• Table – creme caramel (pudding or flan)
• Chair and Table – checkerboard cookies (check out the pikmin recipe!)
• Floor – shortbread cookies with chocolate bar boarder
• Walls – chocolate bar, candy canes, shortbread cookies, royal icing, and cherries

I ended up omitting the ice cream lamp and bowl of sprinkles pieces because they would have way too small to do them justice. Anyway, let’s take a tour shall we?

Here’s our villager looking super stoked about his new digs! It’s like a weird mix of Hansel and Gretel and Total Home Makeover and he’s totally ok with that. In this picture you can see the bookshelf up close. It was a lot of fun to engineer the bookshelf more or less exactly how you would out of real wood and it’s definitely my favorite piece, The gumdrop books looks so cute!

A view from the top gives us a good look at the floor which was the first piece I completed. I ended up measuring the cookies before baking them to make sure they would fit in this kind of a grid. Just a basic shortbread cookie recipe here with a bit a cocoa powder to give us a change of color.

The bed came out…ok. If I had had the time, I would have made a Bavarian filling in order to give it a bit more structure, but as it stands I just used whipped cream which worked alright It looks a bit lumpy if you ask me though haha. My favorite part of this piece is that I just happened to have perfectly accurate sprinkles for the top of the blanket! I’m partial to the strawberry pillows as well :].

This sofa was fairly involved as well! Swiss roll sponge is hit or miss with me so I has nervous making such a thin layer of cake. Luckily the recipe behaved and I was able to roll up the whipped cream and caramel sauce or jelly with ease. Fun fact: the “strawberry” roll cake is actually colored with dried beet powder I still had kicking around since this recipe! The little pillows I was able to cut out from the remaining checkerboard cookies I used for the table and chair.

Just having some fun with these pictures :p. He looks comfy though!

So there you have it! I know it’s not a traditional recipe post, but I’m interested in trying out some new post formats for the new year so let me know what you think in the comments! I have some more Battle Chef Brigade recipes coming up this month for the Link-Up over at Pixelated Provisions so make sure to check that out! She’s got a bunch of really great stuff over there already!

Hey! Thanks for reading all the the way to the end! You’re awesome :D! If you haven’t already and are looking for more nerdy food stuff, consider following me on Twitter, Facebook, tumblr and Instagram. I post a lot of work in progress pictures for the blog as well as stuff from my Twitch streams. If that sounds like something you’d be into, please check out those links above! Anyway, take care everyone and I’ll see you next time with an all-new recipe!

Did you know? I also have a Patreon page where fans like you can help support me directly! There are some pretty cool rewards in it for you as well so you’ll definitely want to check it out :].

A huge thanks to everyone who has supported me so far!

Chets Y., Charlotte G., Tyler S., Derek R., Dan S., Victoria , Kurt P., Fox Corp., Archy Dan, The Gluttonous Geek, Josh M., Val C., Katharina, Daniel L., and Amanda B.

– Bryan