For making the following gingerbread house, you will need sugar, syrup, butter, flour, ginger, cloves, milk, eggs, bicarbonate of soda, an engineer, some CAD software and laser beams to cut everything.
Now that you have have mise-en-place, you can get on with it. At least that’s what I think Johan von Konow did. As for some people Christmas is just not the same without gingerbread, this engineer found a peculiar way of building a gingerbread house.
When talking about gingerbread and desserts, in general, just mentioning the word “engineer” might make people think you have changed the topic. This is not the case here, however. The gingerbread house is a miniature replica of Johan von Konow’s summer house, so you will not be able to tell that it does not have a personal touch. Still, upon hearing that a piece of Computer Assisted Design software was used for making this house, along with lasers, you surely won’t be able to place Hansel and Gretel in the same picture. Hollywood’s latest creation might include hi-tech witches, but they still have a long way to go till they get to lasers.
First of all, the engineer had to bake the gingerbread. Either that or he created the 3D design of the gingerbread house. These two steps are interchangeable, really! One thing that he had to make sure is that the gingerbread sheet has the same thickness all over. Next, von Konow repaired his 50W laser engraver and used it to cut the gingerbread pieces according to the CAD design. After cutting and engraving 32 pieces of gingerbread, he put them together and decorated them with candies, sugar and some sort of icing.
The Rhino project file and the 2D vector files are available on the engineer’s website, just in case anyone else wants to create a replica of his replica of his summer house.
The bad news in all this story is that the gingerbread house is not edible. I know, this ruins the whole point of building a gingerbread house, in the first place. Johan von Konow explains that the laser burned edges have an awful taste and that there needs to be a good ventilation system in the room where the gingerbread is cut and engraved. However, he thinks about building an edible gingerbread house next year, so I’m willing to turn a blind eye for now.
If you liked this post, please check this tasty gingerbread geodesic dome and the GingerBoard.
