While kids and hobbyists may enjoy Trader Joe’s kits and gloopy white icing, the world’s best gingerbread house builders take things to another level entirely. Using “called”construction grade gingerbread“Creating elaborate structures such as Anti-Gravity Gothic Cottage And Indonesian TongkonansThese experts in both manufacturing and cooking manipulate food ingredients with aplomb, spending months creating to honor their masterpieces In the service of some holiday cheer – and often a little competition.
When? heather brookshireA baker in Spring, Texas, her passion for gingerbread houses dates back to just a child good morning americaThis is where he saw that year’s winners National Gingerbread House Contest In Asheville, North Carolina. (The 32nd annual contest was canceled for 2024 in the wake of Hurricane Helene, although its organizers coordinated a slightly different version of the tradition As a stand-in.) In high school, Brookshire started messing around with gingerbread kits for fun, and once she entered culinary school, her hobby grew further. After graduating, she started making her own patterns and buying books on how to build bigger, better gingerbread houses. Now, that is turned it into a careerSelling gingerbread houses, cakes and cookies as a cottage baker in the Houston area.
Brookshire says she has lost count of “how many” contests she has entered, although she does know that she has twice taken Showpiece to the National Gingerbread House Contest, where she says she placed among “the best of the best.” Competed against. (The grand prize winner of the national competition receives a $7,500 check, a trophy and a deluxe weekend stay at Asheville’s Omni Grove Park Inn, where the event is hosted.) She’s also Appeared several times on Food Network, but showing her skills Holiday Gingerbread Showdown, Holiday Baking Championship: Gingerbread ShowdownAnd Christmas Cookie Challenge,
When making gingerbread houses, Brookshire says, her imagination is her only limit. She sometimes leans toward Victorian home design, with the elaborate scrollwork that looks great in icing, but she also loves a good house. mid-century-modern homeAlthough she still uses old-fashioned gingerbread and royal icing for most of her work, she says she’s also experimenting with new techniques. AD Edible Ink Printer to get even more detail on her pieces and tasked her husband with 3D printing cookie cutters, which she could use to create precise and repeatable designs. And, if she’s ever confused about how to keep a portico standing longer or what type of candy best resembles classic bamboo, she need only look online, where recipes from around the world Gingerbread artists gather. message board, facebook groupAnd tiktok to share them suggestions And moveyou can Buy Gingerbread House Template Search on Etsy and across the web Easy Hard Candy Window Recipe And something is said “ginger soil,” which is basically crushed up gingerbread pieces and mixed with tree gum to create something technically Edible but mostly only sculptable.
Gingerbread-by-DesignFirst launched by Loretta Wilson in 1999, Gingerbread was one of the web’s first sources for information. Wilson says that with hundreds of users signing up to create a community of Gingerbread fans and artists who have been “extremely nice and generous and giving”, the site has evolved over time, with forums, online contests and architectural forms of templates. Hosting diverse caches from. Gingerbread makers run the gamut from professional bakers to stay-at-home moms, many of whom pass their love of the craft on to their children, Wilson says.
“You can’t throw together these big pieces in a weekend. You need time to dry, and you need internal project management.”
While tracking Wilson’s 25 years of giant gingerbread creations, she says she’s seen every trick in the book. Although she’s not really sure what cookie gingerbread is made of – does it have to contain molasses? Are these just spices? Does it have to be brown?—She knows you can eat her builder-grade gingerbread if you’re tough, though she doesn’t recommend it. The same goes for the gingerbread houses you might see at the national competition, where Wilson says she used chocolate-dipped grape stems and fresh sage and pine to create tree trunks and vegetation. Used as needles. “None of this is going to kill you,” says Wilson. “It’s not eating a nail. You can Eat it all, but there’s a fine line in competition when it comes to what’s edible. Most of the time, people will run it with their fellow competitors before a competition to see what they think if they’re not sure.”
Wilson says most national competitors begin their entries for the event (usually held in November) in June, building pieces with scroll saws, drills and files. At the national competition, everything from the plywood board base up must be edibleAnd the main composition must be at least 75 percent gingerbread. “You can’t throw these big pieces together in a weekend,” says Wilson. “You need drying time, and you need internal project management, because you can’t put your walls together, build a roof, and start loading it with candy, because it It’s about to collapse.” She adds that these days, a lot of competitors are using sugar syrup to hold their constructions together or coloring their royal icing brown to hide the pieces that hold the walls together. Competitive gingerbread makers are masters of the weather, using dehumidifiers to keep their pieces dry and solid, and bringing carrying kits with them to the competition filled with replacement pieces, icing, and other little fixes, just in case. .
This does not mean that occasional mistakes do not occur. Wilson says she once built a gingerbread house, before she realized that the 36-inch-wide base she used wouldn’t fit her house’s 32-inch-wide front door, which led to some stressful bending. Brookshire says her beautiful pieces only broke because she turned her car into a parking space while transporting them. It is a stressful hobby and requires patience.
It also requires a good understanding of design. Wilson says she first got into gingerbread building because she loved creating houses and floor plans, and has worked with several major regional and global architectural organizations, Even the companiesHold annual gingerbread contests and showcases to raise funds or increase member engagement. American Institute of Architects baltimore, houstonAnd boston For example, all chapters hold competitions, and the Swedish Center for Architecture and Design (Arcades) organizes An annual gingerbread house exhibitAs does the Architectural Museum of London. latter annual gingerbread city Show is even Took contributions from major companies Like Zaha Hadid Architects. Although the standards of those competitions are generally less rigorous than the national competition, they can still produce impressive results.
Rusty Bienvenue, executive director of AIA Houston, says his group Gingerbread Build-Off Over its 15-year existence it has evolved rapidly, changing from a small art space across from City Hall to a large neighborhood park. This year, more than 30 teams — mostly architects, but also some bakers, school groups and locals — will compete for bragging rights and a trophy that looks like a plastic gingerbread man. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people will be in attendance to check out the construction, and hundreds of children will try their hand at building their own extremely sticky, mostly messy houses out of graham crackers and icing. (“My biggest problem with this event,” Bienvenue jokes, “is that people want to shake my hand.”)
“It’s amazing what these people do,” Bienvenue says, adding that his group not only works to spread holiday cheer but also “fosters public engagement and other things that Architecture Center Houston does, like scholarship programs.” It also programs to “provide a place to talk.” That people might not know about otherwise.”
Leonardi Aire Architects’ “A Corner of the Boston Mall of America,” created using gingerbread, fondant, gelatin sheets, pretzel rods and gum drops, was one of the winning 2024 entries of the Boston Society for Architecture’s annual Gingerbread Design Contest and Exhibition.
Sometimes regional programs are also about funding those programs, such as the Boston Society for Architecture. Gingerbread Design Contest and ExhibitionWhich raises funds to support the group’s foundation. With participants tasked with completing a design based on a theme (this year’s name was “Boston Neighborhoods: Holiday in the Hub”), the contest collects entries reflecting the diversity of the city’s architecture. colonial house To modern transit system,
Anne MacKinnon, senior planner at Massachusetts firm Leonardi Aire ArchitectsWorked with my team to produce a Gingerbread version of Ames-Webster Gilded Age Mansion In the city’s Back Bay neighborhood. She says she’s found that even the most savvy architects have struggled to understand the difficulties of working at scale in Gingerbread: “If you’re an architect or someone in this field, you want to show that That attention to detail is part of your tools, so you want to get the details right. That being said, sometimes you can’t make 7,000 windows, so you have to tinker a bit. We do.”
“We were supposed to have four fireplaces in our house this year, and I guess I was lucky if I made one,” says MacKinnon. “It also has 40 dorms, and there’s not enough time in the world to build them all.”
Ultimately, building a gingerbread house – or mansion or train station – is just about having fun and celebrating the holiday season, no matter how long it takes. “Deep down, I think people associate gingerbread with decorating cookies when they’re kids,” says Wilson. “Making gingerbread houses is still a family craft, a holiday craft, and it’s always a special time.”
Top photo courtesy Architecture Center Houston
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