Forget houses, this artist sculpted a dead-on gingerbread Xenomorph

Now that the holidays are over, you’re probably avoiding what’s left of your gingerbread house, but you better be sure to eat this ginger-morph before it eats you.

Just dare to a look at Caroline Eriksson's latest creation, a Xenomorph meticulously made out of gingerbread:

Eriksson is a Norwegian cake artist and sculptor who obviously doesn’t believe in whimsical cookie houses. Her other creations include a gingerbread Optimus Prime, Smaug, and Darth Vader that all look as if they could crush you to crumbs at any moment.

Her Xenomorph didn’t hatch out of an egg and go through multiple embryonic stages to reach this level of fearsomeness, though. As Eriksson commented on the Instagram photo above, the edible extraterrestrial took nearly a full month to create. She dedicated one week to making a structure to hold the entire thing up, and then two and a half weeks to making all the dough, baking the pieces, and gluing everything together with burnt sugar.

For the ginger-morph, Eriksson first built a proportionally correct iron skeleton and designed pieces of gingerbread flesh that would fit over it. Anyone who has ever so much as made a single batch of the holiday-favorite cookies knows that gingerbread dough is notoriously hard to work with (which is why it has to be chilled for an absurdly long time) — so how did the artist keep her Xenomorph from turning into sticky alien sludge?

“I’ve altered the usual recipe a bit to make it stronger–so I wouldn’t recommend for eating,” she said on her post, “but I’m using twice the amount of syrup, and no baking powder. It makes the gingerbread harder and gives it a smoother surface! There’s a whole lot of melted sugar to keep it together!”

At least she didn’t have to deal with any pesky Facehuggers.

(via Bloody-Disgusting)