Check out photos of my gingerbread house this year. Mad props to my girlfriend Rachel for her enormous effort on this project.
This gingerbread house is a replica (with artistic license) of the Queen Anne High School building in Seattle. The original building has 86 windows on the front side alone – the gingerbread version only has 18. This probably disqualifies us from entering the National Historic Register’s Gingerbread House/Gumdrop Nativity Competition. Next year, perhaps we’ll try for a more accurate model. We doubled the gingerbread and icing recipes found here to accommodate the size of the building (5 feet 17″ wide by 2 feet 10″ tall).
hey teach me how to do one of those houses i love pink
Hi,
The house looks amazing! Good job. I was wondering if you could help me with something: I’m a pastry chef working in Dublin and I’ve been asked to create a very large gingerbread house for a client. The finished result would be slightly smaller than yours (probably about 3 feet high, I imagine.) I’m worried about it collapsing and was wondering if you could tell me how you avoided that? Is it as simple as merely tripling the recipes and glueing everything together with royal icing? Any information you could give would be a great help – I haven’t yet accepted the commission so if you could contact me asap I would be very grateful.
Thanks!!
-Amanda
Hi Amanda,
I’d be happy to help. We used cardboard boxes, placed inside the walls, to add structure and support to the gingerbread house. For this particular project, we used the long cardboard boxes from a 12-pack of soda cans to brace the structure. By keeping all 4 sides of the box intact, it adds a lot of strength, and even supported the weight of the flat roof. Plus it gives you a huge glue area for keeping the walls upright.
The cardboard boxes were completely hidden by the gingerbread, so they didn’t detract at all from the exterior look.
I hope this information is helpful. Good luck with your project, and please send pictures when it is completed!
-Scott
By the way, I LOVE your R2D2 cake!
wow! I was just googling images of the Queen Anne High School to show a friend and found this. You are my hero! I love gingerbread and this building… I am now going to read the hell out of your blog. Thanks!
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