Making Great Gingerbread Houses: Delicious Designs from Cabins to Castles, from Lighthouses to Tree Houses

The authors lay solid groundwork in the introductory section, explaining the key points of gingerbread building, pattern making, and utilizing various types of trimmings, and offer basic recipes for gingerbread dough, royal icing, marzipan, pastillage, and fondant. Then it's on to the structures themselves, contributed by more than four dozen designers. Houses, cabins, inns, chapels, castles, lighthouses, even whole little villages drip with snowy icing, as candies, cookies, and other goodies mimic stone, brick, shingle, stucco, logs, and landscaping. This is not a step-by-step guide but rather a gallery of wonderful ideas, with photos of each creation and some very general suggestions about making them. The photography is not high quality but is adequate enough to show detail, and templates are included for many of the structures. One designer even found an ingenious solution to the edibility dilemma, turning the flat roof of her elaborate Victorian concoction into a serving surface for Christmas cookies. --Amy Handy