The Gingerbread Architect

Gingerbread houses are fun to decorate, especially if you have a couple of kids or grandkids handy to help make some of the big design decisions, such as “should this gumdrop be red or green?” They’re primarily used for display purposes, so it’s often easiest to buy a kit for a gingerbread house and work from that, rather than making the house components from scratch. The kits may be convenient, but they are also very limiting. If you ever wanted to try making more of a showpiece, The Gingerbread Architect is the place to start.

This book contains detailed blueprints for the designs of 12 different types of gingerbread houses from simple buildings to two story masterpieces. These blueprints are meant to be enlarged so that you can easily get the right size pieces for your constructions without having to multiply out scaled-down measurements or eyeball the angles while you cut out walls. The instructions are surprisingly easy to follow and are quite detailed; there is no need to be an experienced gingerbread baker to put these together. There are also lots of pictures that show how the various pieces of each piece fit together, too.

The recipes for the gingerbread are included inside the book. Construction gingerbread is a bit different from the gingerbread you might bake for a holiday dessert because it needs to be a bit sturdier than your average cookie to support the weight of the rest of the building and all the decorations. Speaking of decorations, there are plenty of suggestions about what you should use and where in the book to help you get a realistic look for windows, lights and all those other details that make a good house into a showstopper.