I haven’t made a gingerbread house since I was a kid. Gingerbread making in Europe, I recently learned while trying to figure out what my house should look like, dates to the tenth or eleventh century. There was a long tradition of baking gingerbread to look like things. However, it was only after the publication of Grimm’s fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” that gingerbread houses became popular. Apparently, we in the U.S. get the custom from German immigrants. So, I decided to make my gingerbread house resemble a half-timber cottage with a thatched roof.

I used Sketch-Up to make a little computer model of my idea.

 

Then I drew each of the necessary pieces in a vector drawing program and printed them out. Here is an example of one page:

I used a recipe that I found online.

Here is the result:

I cooked up the leftover dough and sampled it. It doesn’t taste too bad.