Customer Reviews

The Gingerbread Architect: Recipes and Blueprints for Twelve Classic American Homes

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 daunting.

I'm not blown away by any of the designs I see in "The Gingerbread Architect", but I am impressed by their thoroughness. They've planned out the steps, day by day, into reasonable chunks of work; they list exactly the ingredients and candies you need to recreate their designs; they have templates for exactly the pieces you need to cut out, to scale; they list alternate ideas and decor, how to adapt the style, and pitfalls they had with certain designs or decor choices. And I was impressed with some of their creative use of materials, particularly decorating with upside down ice cream cones for trees and green rice krispy treats for shrubberies.

All in all, I feel a lot more sanguine about tackling this holiday craft with this book in hand.

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Well, it is Christmas day and I'm still not done with this project. Where on earth do you buy hard candies these days? The recipes for the dough and the icing were similar to others I've used (Bo Frieburg) and the directions were easy to follow. I had a snafu with the pattern pieces; I had absolutely no idea that 400% larger was so big, and neither did the folks at Kinkos. With the size of the Kinkos bill, I think the pattern pages could have been laid out more efficiently. In the end, I threw out the Kinkos copies anyway, because a gingerbread house over 14" tall would overwhelm my dining room. I resized the pages to only 300% and went from there.

Cut out, baking, and assembly have been moderately straightforward. I chose to do the Victorian on the book cover (my son picked it) which is a medium difficulty plan. The directions did NOT point out that I shouldn't have cut out the doors, which is annoying, since I then had to cut separate door pieces and tack them on. It was also unclear exactly how much crushed candy should be added to the window spaces and my windows look thin and lumpy.

Altogether, however, it is a very handsome house and I would never have designed such a complex house on my own. My son is thrilled to bits, the air smells like gingerbread, and I didn't have to think of all the details myself. Compared to a ready-to-make kit, making a gingerbread house from scratch is a labor of love (and money). But this book did do a nice job of setting it out, step-by-step, and taking away the guesswork.

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 FORCED to go to the copy shop to blow up their blueprints 400% or to painstakingly add and subtract dimensions from other pieces on the house to figure out what certain walls heights and widths are. You'd think that the authors, who obviously took a lot of time and effort making these plans, would be thourough in their depictions!

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.

I grabbed this book for a friend who bakes. However, after a better look, I bought one for myself with the idea that I would attempt a gingerbread house holiday project with my daughter. The photos are inspiring and the instructions were clear and simple enough that I thought we could actually pull it off.

My daughter and I are still looking at the beautiful shots of the finished houses and deciding on which one we will build. Kudos to the authors for such a lovely book to share with my child.

I'm just writing this review because I have looked at practically every book on gingerbread houses available and I am very impressed with their layouts, tons of templates that I haven't tried (I'm into simple traditional houses) but are very well laid out so that you can cut up all your dough efficiently (without so much re-rolling), and gives loads of great ideas for decorating beyond the standard snowy scenes. The photos aren't intimidating either, they don't look scarily perfect like some of the books out there (which seem to be trying to create something that no longer looks like gingerbread and candy!) so one feels more inspired to get started and just have fun with it.

I enjoyed looking at the photos of the book for about 11 months before I started building my ginger bread house.
I thought I had a good idea of what it would take to pull it off, but I greatly underestimated the time, money and trips to the store this would involve.

A couple of warnings: the enlarged photocopies of the blueprints cost $25 from Staples -- more than the book -- and were so complicated I had to leave the book for a "copier specialist" and return the next day to pick up.

It took my husband more than 1 1/2 hours to cut out the templates from these photocopies.

The dough was easy to work with but puffed up and expanded like crazy in the oven. We had to trim down the pieces.
The recipe called for 2 batches of the dough and claimed we might have some left over. We needed 4 batches of dough and had zero left over.

The back piece of the Victorian Gothic house was so large we had to go out and buy a new sheet pan.

Then the back piece started to buckle under the weight of the roof after two days. This could certainly be user error on my part, but I was panicked that my more than $100 investment(royal icing, fondant, new sheet pan, parchment paper, photocopies of blue prints, dough ingredients, etc) and 20+ hours of time was going to collapse.

So my husband got out the power tools and cut a back piece out of plywood to shore up the back.

Here's to hoping it makes it to Christmas.

If you are going to try this, I would recommend making a practice house over the summer. We learned a lot of tricks along the way.

Also, just remind yourself that everything takes a lot longer than you would think. Just unwrapping all of the candies for the glass windows took a while.

I bought this book as a gingerbread novice. I love the ideas, and the way the book is laid out. There are plenty of good tips, and I like that you get a timeline for when you should be doing things.

My one BUT is the gingerbread recipe given. I found it really expanded, and all of the pieces had to be cut down to the proper size! So I love the book, but didn't love the recipe it came with. I will be looking for another.

I bought this book last year after Christmas and was planning to make a house from it for this Christmas. We moved into a Tudor house in the summer so of course we had to make the Tudor house from the book to match. The directions were easy for me to understand and they have great decorating ideas. We did have to trim some of the pieces to fit just right, but I think it is because the gingerbread expanded in the oven. The house turned out beautiful! Its definitely been a hit this Christmas.

I saw this in a bookstore today and am ordering a copy for my sister. I loved the way the houses look and the variety of them.

As for the previous reviewer, excuse me but WHO in the WORLD makes two story gingerbread houses with interiors?

I got this book on sale after christmas and saved in for the following holiday. I took the book to a Kinko's and had full sized copies made. Then I just use parchment to trace the various parts. The parchment can be laid out on the dough and cut with a sharp knife - very easy, and can be used over and over (if you make the same house every year) My grandchildren look forward to doing a different house every year. Each year we become more inventive - it is a wonderful tradition. It takes several visits to complete but it's project in process and when we finally finish just before Christmas we take a photo with our house. Last year I cut out a picture of the kids and made a door out of a candy box so when you opened the door the the Gingerbread house they were waving - it was great.