What happens when an architect who is also an avid baker gets together with a house-obsessed pastry chef? Twelve classic American homes rendered in gingerbread. Are you dreaming of a colonial Christmas? Here's your chance to build a traditional Cape Cod house in freshly baked gingerbread, complete with breath-mint pinnacles, Twizzler shingles, and a brick-red fruit-leather chimney. Prefer nineteenth-century New York elegance? Why not whip up an urban brownstone, embellished with crushed butterscotch windows, Tootsie Roll staircase posts, and a front courtyard tiled in mini Chiclets. Is the Santa Fe look more your style? Try a gingerbread pueblo, landscaped with rock-candy cacti and turbinado-sugar sand. Here to guide you through every step of building your gingerbread dream house is The Gingerbread Architect, created by New York-- and London-based architect Susan Matheson and professional baker Lauren Chattman. Featuring detailed blueprints and elevations of the houses alongside baking directions and essential construction notes, this modern guide to the traditional holiday craft of creating gingerbread houses has projects for bakers of all levels, from novice to advanced. For each house, Matheson and Chattman provide historical context and descriptions of prominent architectural features, demonstrating how to execute those characteristics in gingerbread and candy. Detailed instructions cover everything from baking and assembling the walls to piping icing and landscaping the yard. And to help match gingerbread houses to bakers-and their little helpers-each house has a difficulty rating, ranging from one gingerbread man to four. With full-color photographs of the finished houses, tips on the construction schedule, baking and candy resource guides, a glossary of architectural terms, and instructions for lighting the houses from within, The Gingerbread Architect is the complete guide to the ultimate family holiday baking project-for anyone with a keen eye and a sweet tooth.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
The Gingerbread Architect:
This is a great book! It is beautifully illustrated and well written. I just hosted a gingerbread house building party for 15 children ages 2.5 to 9 years. Although I did not use the patterns I was very happy with the performance of the recipes. The dough making and baking were simple and the "glue" was magnificent. It was easy for the kids to handle and stuck well...in fact there was not one single "structural failure". I can't wait to try one of the more elaborate creations that is shown in the book.
Not worth it:
I was excited when I saw this book available, however I was disappointed when I went through it. The houses aren't inspiring and didn't offer anything exciting that is in other Gingerbread House books.
Not worth adding to your collection. If it's your first book on Gingerbread House making, you may like it.
Beware! Missing dimensions on their blueprints!:
When I saw this book at the store, I couldn't not get it. I love making gingerbread houses but am sick of decorating your standard 'box-style' house. At a quick glance, I saw that this book has blueprints for multiple styles of homes. However, when I got it home and started to actually draw out the blueprints for the house i wanted (I didn't feel like going to the copy shop to blow up their blueprints, as they suggest), I came to find that their blueprints are missing measurements!! You essentially are... more info
Very thoughtful and thorough:
My latest book acquisition arrived today and I am so excited. Last year we designed and built a gingerbread house using the instructions from "The Professional Pastry Chef" and it was much more complicated than I had anticipated. Not hard, just complicated. Planning a design for even a simple A-frame house was very tedious, making sure everything would line up and the roof would overhang and everything. Then decorating: what candy to buy, how to use it effectively. It came out cute, but doing it again was... more info
