I spent the 2008 holidays working on this year's gingerbread house. In the past I have tried to do a gingerbread house each year, and picked up the hobby again last year. I made good on making it an annual thing, though work pressures meant I couldn't begin the house until after Christmas so it didn't get to be a centrepiece on the holiday table. While I have a lot to learn still about this craft, I'm starting to feel ready to become a "serious gingerbreader", doing several per year for practice, entering contests, etc. All that has to be within the scope of a hobby, though, and at that someone who has lots of other hobbies.
The need to document the house led me back to another hobby—photography. I want to do more of that, especially food photography to enhance my recipe collection. I have a lot to learn about that hobby too though. The pictures currently shown here don't meet my satisfaction, because I couldn't arrange for the type of lighting and backgrounds I want. I hope to post improved pictures if this house at some point, before it gets sacrificed.
Some people will recognize the design of this house—it's the house I grew up in. I don't know what Freudian impulse prompted me to do this (you can see the corner that was my bedroom in the photo on the left). But it was advantageous to replicate the design of a structure I knew. Even though I was guessing relative sizes and placements from memory, I knew the basic structural characteristics of the house, and could translate that to the gingerbread architecture. In addition to replicating the interior walls and all the windows, I included the beam that held the roof up, plus the columns holding the beam up. You can see those features through the windows in the top photo if you know what you're looking for.
Decoration
In this house, I didn't end up doing a lot of decoration beyond representing the structural features of the house. This was partly because I spent so much time on the designing and building that I was just exhausted when I had the model built, and didn't want to glue on a bunch of supercilious decorations. Plus this was a model of a house that is and it wasn't as important to make it fanciful. And in this case, the pleasure of the house was the nerdy pleasure of engineering, replicating the original but transforming it to a different medium and making it work (i.e., not fall down).
One thing I would have liked to represent was that the original house was half underground. Ground level came up to the bottom of the windows on all sides, and above them in some cases, held away from the windows by protruding retaining walls. I ended up not including this because 1) it would have been harder to appreciate the design of the house, especially since for the life of me I can't find the sort of lights one would use to light the interior, and 2) it would be quite a project to build up that much virtual earth around the house. Even airy marshmallows with a coating of icing would take a while and not be very stable.
Windows
A dominant feature of the original house was the south-facing windows, intended to provide passive solar heat. I wanted to replicate those with real sugar-glass windows. I think I did reasonably well. It was a challenge to design the partitions between the windows, which would be done in gingerbread, in a way that was true to scale and yet wouldn't be so fragile it would break the minute I handled it. Once the sugar was poured in and hardened, it provides additional structural strength, and in the end I didn't have a problem with that part of the house breaking.
I really like the idea of sugar-glass windows in gingerbread houses. Besides that they can look like the real thing, they're even a corresponding material: sugar-glass is vitrified (cooled but not crystallized) sugar, just the same as real glass is vitrified silicon. When I poured the hot sugar into the spaces for the windows, it spread to a particular thickness it seemed to want to keep, and then would fill in the space. That was a little thicker than I wanted, but still looks like glass. I did try spreading some syrup thinner on my countertop—it worked, but would be hard to do that inside the space in a gingerbread wall, and still have a smooth surface.
In the photo, you can see that the windows have a bit of an old-fashioned "pebbled" look. This is because I used parchment paper to make sure the windows wouldn't stick to the countertop, and while it looked flat, it apparently has that pattern which is more visible when the sugar window refracts the light. In the future, I think it will be reasonably safe to pour windows directly on a lightly oiled smooth surface, and just slide the gingerbread piece off when it cools.
The windows also came out slightly yellow (not very evident in photos), because I accidentally caramelized the sugar slightly. The sugar should be cooked to 310 °F, but at the last stage of cooking the temperature shoots up quickly. I took it off the heat at 300 °F but it went right up to 320 °F in no time. So slow the burner when it's getting to the end, and plan to take it off when it's at 290 °F.
Roof shingles
I wanted to have the roof look much like the original. Instead of doing a candy roof, I decided to make pastillage shingles, tinted to the slate grey I remember on the house. They were made on a similar principle to the original shingles—wide strips of material with notches cut in the lower half to make the shingle pattern, and then laid out overlapping and each row offset like bricks. I rolled out the pastillage as thin as I could, cut strips the width of my ruler and as long as I could, and made notches in the lower half of the strip every inch. Then I laid them out and cut them off when I got to the end. This was very successful, though a bit time consuming and I started thinking it would be nice to build a "shingling jig" if I was going to do a lot of this.
Columns
The columns holding up the roof beam were done in sugar cube bricks to simulate cinderblocks. This prompted me to buy a Dremel, to be able to cut sugar cubes in half so I could have full and half size blocks to create the brick pattern. I figure that's got to be one of the more unexpected uses of that tool! I had little bits of sugar everywhere, wished I had goggles, and even spun out a little cotton candy.
Now, actually, the entire original house was build in cinderblocks. However, this was a gingerbread house, so I wasn't going to try to replicate cinderblocks for the whole thing. Just doing the columns gave the flavour of it. This got me thinking about some of the artistic principles in this kind of modeling.
Art in the gingerbread medium
A lot of art is based on poetic exaggeration—cartoon caricatures are an obvious extreme example. I've heard, though, that a painting that people will say is "photo-realistic" actually has exaggerated features that a photograph wouldn't represent—and that a painting that is truly photo-realistic would even look false, even though it's more true. When modeling a house in gingerbread, you're capturing an essence of the design, not trying to replicate it.
Some of the exaggeration is necessitated by the medium—I had to make wider partititions between the windows, simplify proportions, the roof shingles are disproportionately large and the colour more saturated than the original, etc. You even see white icing joins between walls that weren't in the original house. I consider that part of the medium and don't think it should be hidden, such as by colouring the icing brown. It's things like this that say "this is a model house made in food" and make it more expressive. I think this observation should prompt me to take more liberty in the future, though as I said on last year's house, that needs to be firmly ground in a context of reality.
I found working on this house very stimulating. It was both intellectual and creative, and involved a foray into a medium where I still have a lot to learn. Working on this even got my creative juices flowing in other domains, and made it clear to me that I have to keep creative activities a regular part of my life to create the energy to do all that I want to do. I'm hoping to keep up with gingerbreading, as well as my other culinary hobbies, plus do photography, music, textile hobbies (crochet and I think I'll take up rag weaving)… Doing this stuff isn't just a "nice to have" in my life, it is really essential to achieving the goals I have.
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