Gingerbread Creations | Transcend Design

Gingerbread 2012: Canuck Place Children’s Hospice

January 1, 2013January 17, 2021
by brucen

A few years ago I received The Gingerbread Architect as a gift. It’s a great book, and it comes with recipes and ingredients for 12 different gingerbread masterpieces.

Last year, I opted to make the Urban Brownstone, which is rated as one of the more difficult houses to make in the book. Despite the written difficulty level, I found the baking of the walls to be pretty easy, and the decorating wasn’t too difficult. In my blog post summarizing that build, I wrote:

Next year, I am strongly considering making my own house out of gingerbread.

Perhaps I was just a bit too ambitious with my plans this year.

My inspiration: Canuck Place Children’s Hospice, also known as Glen Brae Manor, also known as the Tait Mansion.

Canuck Place provides care for children with life-threatening illnesses, and support for those kid’s families. The kids that stay here have access to the best palliative care that is available, at a first rate facility – the first of it’s kind in North America.

Players from the Vancouver Canucks are often seen at Canuck Place to visit – to put smiles on kid’s faces, and perhaps to keep their own lives in perspective.

Usually during a regular NHL season, there are great fundraising efforts for Canuck Place and awareness through those efforts is elevated. During the lockout this year, I thought it might be a fun idea to donate this year’s gingerbread house to Canuck Place. And what better building to model than the hospice itself!

The structure is a heritage building within the Shaughnessy neighbourhood in Vancouver, BC. It is a 4-story mansion, built in 1910. It has very distinctive domed turrets, and features curved exterior walls on nearly every side of the house. There is a large covered porch at the front of the mansion, as well as on the east and west sides of the building.

Design of exterior walls. Many pieces and this didn’t even include turrets, domes, roof, dormers.

One of my major design concerns was being able to bake a dome out of gingerbread. I used a ball-shaped cake pan here.

Another concern was being able to bend gingerbread to fit the many curved walls in the building. Here I used card stock paper over a rough LEGO mold for support.

The turrets didn’t come out perfectly round. A happy coincidence since light from the inside needed to come through anyway.

Beginning to assemble the walls with a complex system of coffee mugs. Knowing the rough dimensions of the building was useful in figuring out where the walls would go.

More of the exterior walls up, held together by royal icing. The turrets didn’t fit quite right, so I ended up shaving off thin bits here.

At this point I was able to actually design, measure and bake the roof pieces.

Domes and half of the roof are attached here with icing, supports, and pins (removed later) to hold the pieces on.

Lower portion of 3 porches are attached, and the roof is tiled here with Hubba Bubba Bubble Tape, which is available everywhere until you look for it. =)

Front porch roof is attached and decorated. Dormers were baked and attached also.

Detail shot of the front walk way, made with broken Necco wafers.

Detail shot of the West porch, from the rear of the house. Railings are made from piped royal icing.

Detail shot of the East porch, from the rear of the house. Grass is made from coconut, mixed with good ole green Food Club Food Colouring.

Overhead photo of the house, showing the landscaping layout.

Detail shot of the front yard. Shrubs and trees are made of Rice Krispie treats, with green food colouring added to the marshmallow mix.

That’s it! I have to thank my wife Marnie for being the voice of reason, and for the use of her equipment – it helps to have a cake decorator for a wife when you need to make 10 pounds of gingerbread dough. It also helped immensely to have her creativity and an extra set of steady hands. I’d also like to thank Dianna (@Dianna_Chr) for arranging access to the Canuck Place grounds, and Dawn (@light_and_lit) for some good baking advice.

Hope you enjoyed the post as much as I enjoyed making this house!

Gingerbread Creations

Gingerbread 2011: Urban Brownstone Complete

December 16, 2011January 17, 2021
by brucen

A few years ago I received this as a gift. The Gingerbread Architect is a great book, and it comes with recipes and ingredients for 12 different gingerbread masterpieces.

This year, I opted to make the Urban Brownstone, which is rated as one of the more difficult houses to make in the book. Despite the written difficulty level, I found the baking of the walls to be pretty easy, and the decorating wasn’t too difficult either. It was definitely easier going than last year’s Second Empire house.

Next year, I am strongly considering making my own house out of gingerbread.

Without further ado – here are the photos from my process this year. Hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed making this year’s house. Happy Holidays everyone!

Plans - enlarged, copied and cut from The Gingerbread Architect.	Rolling and cutting 8 pounds of gingerbread dough. This was the front wall piece, which needed the windows cut out.
Everything is baked at this point. Here I've melted hard butterscotch candies into the windows, and piped icing for mullions.	The base for the house. I cut a hole in the base to string the LED lights through, and ran the AC cord out the back.
Pre-construction tools. Icing, piping bag, various tips for the bag, and that's what she said.	First wall is up on the board, held up with a complex system of coffee mugs.
Four outside walls are up. Held together with pins while the icing "glue" dries.	View of the inside. Lights in a bunch at the bottom. I used more pins to secure the lights higher on the vertical gingerbread struts.
Details - front stairs, door below the stoop, Rice Krispies hedge, mini Chiclets patio.	Details - sanding sugar roof, Candy Bloks chimney.
Details - front door, flower baskets, windows boxes with flowers and leaves.	Money shot! With the windows lit, you can almost see people having holiday parties inside.
Another shot of the finished house. Party on Wayne! Party on Garth!

Gingerbread Creations

Gingerbread 2011: Urban Brownstone

November 26, 2011January 17, 2021
by brucen

A few years ago I received this as a gift. The Gingerbread Architect is a great book, and it comes with recipes and ingredients for 12 different gingerbread masterpieces.

It’s a good coffee table book, as it has plenty of photographs of the houses, blueprint plans for each house, and excellent step-by-step instruction. The only downside is that some of the candies are not that easy to come by in Canada, as the book was written and published in the States.

Unlike my wife, who is an excellent baker and makes amazing cakes, I have very little baking and decorating experience, so some of the plans are intimidating. In 2009, I worked up enough courage to give one of these houses a try.

2009_house — Gingerbread 2009: Victorian Farmhouse. My first attempt at a nice looking house.

I opted for the “Victorian Farmhouse” which is also featured on the cover of the book. Making the gingerbread dough and baking the pieces was quite easy, while the decorating (piping the icing, rolling fondant, cutting shingles and bricks) was quite time consuming. I had to do everything after dinner and after the kids were put to bed for the evening as well, as there isn’t a lot of time to spare around our house. The entire work is definitely a labour of love, as it took me a few weeks to get it all done. I was happy with the result though!

Last year I attempted the “Second Empire House”. I took more time to take pictures along the way, and documented some of the steps in the pictures below.

Plans laid out with the gingerbread dough.	Most of the large pieces baked, twice to melt windows.
Putting up walls with large mugs. Icing and pins to hold things together.	Walls and roof and front entrance put together. With live tweeting of course!
The roof took forever.	The house is finished! Yes, the inside is lit! =)

This year, I’m planning on making an Urban Brownstone – if you’ve been in large cities like New York, it will look familiar to you: tall building, front stoop offset from center. In fact, if you’ve seen Sesame Street, it might look familiar to you. I probably won’t add Oscar the Grouch out front!