At holidays like Easter with the children we have fun decorating a gingerbread house with the children,who love candy to the point of having “visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads.” For the adult-sized children who aspire to become master craftsman and build a gingerbread house with the dream-to-vision equation effect, it takes expert care to draw, bake and decorate an award worthy gingerbread masterpiece custom home.

The basic building blocks sound simple enough: make the dough, a template, bake, cool, put together with icing and decorate with candy…. or on second thought that might not sound so easy, so you can just buy a prefabricated kit and put it together, and seemingly receive the quick and easy satisfaction of a finished gingerbread house. But the quick and easy fix doesn’t mean the best result, and usually results in a gingerbread shack that looks something like this:

Professional sugar artists and bakers take time and put their artistic skills to work in their baking, just like a professional home builder takes artistic care to work in their carpentry. They carefully study their dough recipe, and know the added details like using an unsulfured molasses will give a darker appearance and add strength to the gingerbread cookies. They will passionately create a 3d model with plastified cardboard templates, which will prevent the dough from sticking. To get perfectly cut edges, it takes a rotary cutter instead of a knife. They will chill the dough before baking to help keep the forms and avoid expansion in the oven. And once the core structural gingerbread panels are finished baking,they will know not to use royal icing to glue it together, but to use melted sugar instead.

The outside decoration features like the windows, doors, and roof shingles, are pre-painted using gel food coloring and royal icing, this adds a better quality look than liquid color. Now that the house itself is assembled, time to add candy decorations by first setting the icing mortar with piping bags, and then gluing on jellybeans, smarty’s, gummies, and other treats… which soon become very tempting to pick off and munch on, but for that brief moment in time before enjoying the fruits of labor, take a moment to bask in the beauty of the gingerbread custom dream home.

The Alair Homes Victoria family team at home built this beautiful gingerbread bunny hutch, baked by our own professional sugar artist and mom Scarlet, with the help of 2-yr-old Antoinette, and 4-yr-old Marcus. Just like building a real custom home for our clients, we can see the difference in experience with the care of custom craftsmanship, and enjoy sharing such early life lessons with our children about pride of profession and the rewards of attention to detail and quality.