This year’s theme; “Rep your arch’ style,” allowed us to create a Gingerbread structure which represents a favorite architectural style of ours. One of the rules was that everything must be edible.
This is our first time making a custom gingerbread structure, and we jumped in at the deep end, and decided to replicate a much-loved OL+ project of ours, the Beauport Gloucester Hotel.
As you can see from an aerial view of the hotel, it was a very ambitions undertaking since the Beauport has a complicated roof structure. We gave it our best, and learned a lot along the way, which will help with our next challenge!
VOTE for our Gingerbread Hotel >>
Donations help fund the BSA Foundation,
whose mission is “to build a better Boston” read more >>
.
Here are a few things the OL+ Gingerbread Team learned during the gingerbread design/build:
TIPS & TRICKS
- You can never have too much Edible Glue!
- Our initial model will be of thicker card next time, to mimic the width of the gingerbread!
- The “sections” of the gingerbread house were printed out onto our everyday, wide-format bond paper. We placed the cut paper shapes on top of the rolled dough, and cut out the dough sections prior to cooking. During the cooking process we discovered that they adhered and became ‘greaseproof’ paper, and so were easy to remove when the time came. Since the dough spreads during the cooking process, the paper gave us a straight edge to follow in order to bevel & trim each section edge!
- It is AMAZING the amount of ‘edible’ treats available to buy; colored paper, gold paper, paint colors to name a few!
- Even though our creation is technically edible, after all the modeling and tweaking and seasonal coughing that went on, no one should eat this!
- We noticed that our competitors had roofs that were very simple/flat, OR molded from frosting. It took some work to get our roof shapes to fit together. It appears that unless we treat this a DESIGN/BUILD project, and find a good BUILD PARTNER (in this case a pastry chef) we may be required to be a little less adventurous with our design next year!
Creating the Beauport Hotel Gloucester out of Gingerbread was fun! Take a look at the PROCESS images below.
trimming the gingerbread
rolling the fondant
pressing designs into the fondant
putting it together – loving the edible glue!
OL+ decorating teamwork!
finally done – gotta love the mermaid!
finally done – the back
finally done – aerial view
transporting CAREFULLY to the BSA
in place at the BSA in Boston
in place at the BSA in Boston
PRESS:
