The Magic of Gingerbread

An award-winning pastry artist shares her secrets for creating classic gingerbread houses and a bounty of other gingerbread whimsies, including a gingerbread space rocket, robot, and chess set!

• Includes 16 beautiful projects for bakers of all ages and skill levels.
• Provides step-by-step instructions for making the perfect gingerbread, creating and coloring icing, and putting them together for fun edible art pieces to display and enjoy all year long.
• Every recipe is paired with beautiful full-color photos, including progress photos for ease of understanding.
• Pastry and decorating tips and techniques are also provided.
• Hardcover.
• 176 pages.
• 8-1/4 inches wide by 10-1/4 inches high.

A pastry artist based in Ottawa, Canada, author and photographer Catherine Beddall is a two-time winner of the CMHC/Habitat for Humanity's gingerbread house competition in Ottawa, and 2011 winner of the Canadian Gingerbread House Championship. She runs her own business, and she is a pastry arts instructor at Algonquin College.

''Four walls and a roof make a gingerbread house. But once bakers open Beddall's well-photographed instructional book, that plain notion of gingerbread's use literally flies out the window. Using her graphic design skills and baking prowess, she concocts more than a dozen objects to fashion, ranging from cookie puzzles to a very elaborate robot and show house. No worries, since her introductory chapters set up bakers for success, starting with tools and materials (most of which can be found in home kitchens) and providing book, chapter, and verse on the intricacies of working with gingerbread, royal icing (the glue for all the projects), and fondant, or decorative sugar dough. She details tips and tricks that will enable novices to master the use of piping tools and step-by-step photographic directions that cover flooding (thinning the royal icing so it spreads evenly over a gingerbread shape), among others. All projects are elegantly crafted and simple in design yet impactful when completed: holiday place cards, two-inch-tall tree ornaments, a toy box any child would delight in receiving, and a haunted house that's not too frightening. Proof indeed that gingerbread is for more than Christmas.'' --Booklist, Starred Review