One of our annual holiday traditions is the design and construction of a tricked out Gingerbread House! This year we couldn’t resist a rendition of Handel’s Ice Cream store, in honor of our newest client. Handel’s you must put a store in St. Louis!!

Ok, so how does an architectural firm design and build a gingerbread house? Like any structure, it starts with a good set of plans and drawings. Once we have the overall building layout, we choose a scale that will fit on our presentation board. This year we selected a 3/8 scale (which means that 3/8 of an inch in the model = one foot in real life).

We then print each wall and roof plane to use as a template for baking the gingerbread. No cardboard cheats for us! Only the finest gingerbread for our buildings! Each piece is rolled and cut to match the template and then baked. Straight out of the oven we then pour rock candy into molds to create windows.

Caramelized sugar acts as the structural connection to hold the walls and roof together. The roof is shingled with Necco Wafers, Mini Starburst serve as bricks, candied coated sunflower seeds make great Christmas lights, and Airheads become siding and benches. Interior “lights” consist of Pete’s pocket flashlight. Finally, lots and lots of fondant icing is transformed into trees, bushes, and wreaths. Brown, white, and black Necco wafers make great paving stones. A pond, also made from rock candy on a bed of blue fondant icing completes our landscape architecture. No gingerbread house is complete without snow, so coconut flakes and powdered sugar are used to transform the structure into a winter wonderland.

The result, if we do say so ourselves, is spectacular!!

As is true of so many of our projects, this is definitely a team effort. Props to Todd Donze (design-bake), DeAnn Woerther (whose brilliant mind transformed various candy brands into building materials), and Christy Phelps, Rebekah Schranck, Farrah Elamir, Cassandra Wallace, Lindsay Straatmann, and Pete Schwartz (master builders and constructors).