Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 641.71 EAN: 9780307406781 ISBN: 0307406784 Label: Clarkson Potter Manufacturer: Clarkson Potter Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 144 Publication Date: October 21, 2008 Publisher: Clarkson Potter Release Date: October 21, 2008 Sales Rank: 2166 Studio: Clarkson Potter
Product DescriptionWhat 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.
What Others Say
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 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 ... Read More
A Fun Project with the Kids
I grabbed The Gingerbread Architect: Recipes and Blueprints for Twelve Classic American Homes 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.
Creative and fun!
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?
Don't be fooled by the word Architect in the title
I assumed that when the title said Architect that it contained blueprints for gingerbread houses that might show how to create true 2 floor gingerbread houses, that is those having a real second floor as well as interior design. Sadly, The Gingerbread Architect: Recipes and Blueprints for Twelve Classic American Homes just contains simplistic facades of various types of houses, and none of them are particularly special. I was also suprised at how sloppily decorated the houses were in the photos.
