The Gingerbread Architect: Recipes and Blueprints for Twelve Classic American Homes

What happens when an architect who is also an avid baker gets together with a house-obsessed pastry chef? Twelve classic American homes rendered in gingerbread.

Are you dreaming of a colonial Christmas? Here’s your chance to build a traditional Cape Cod house in freshly baked gingerbread, complete with breath-mint pinnacles, Twizzler shingles, and a brick-red fruit-leather chimney. Prefer nineteenth-century New York elegance? Why not whip up an urban brownstone, embellished with crushed butterscotch windows, Tootsie Roll staircase posts, and a front courtyard tiled in mini Chiclets. Is the Santa Fe look more your style? Try a gingerbread pueblo, landscaped with rock-candy cacti and turbinado-sugar sand.

Here to guide you through every step of building your gingerbread dream house is The Gingerbread Architect, created by New York— and London-based architect Susan Matheson and professional baker Lauren Chattman. Featuring detailed blueprints and elevations of the houses alongside baking directions and essential construction notes, this modern guide to the traditional holiday craft of creating gingerbread houses has projects for bakers of all levels, from novice to advanced.

For each house, Matheson and Chattman provide historical context and descriptions of prominent architectural features, demonstrating how to execute those characteristics in gingerbread and candy. Detailed instructions cover everything from baking and assembling the walls to piping icing and landscaping the yard. And to help match gingerbread houses to bakers–and their little helpers–each house has a difficulty rating, ranging from one gingerbread man to four.

With full-color photographs of the finished houses, tips on the construction schedule, baking and candy resource guides, a glossary of architectural terms, and instructions for lighting the houses from within, The Gingerbread Architect is the complete guide to the ultimate family holiday baking project–for anyone with a keen eye and a sweet tooth.

SUSAN MATHESON grew up in Nova Scotia with a passion for baking. Eventually, she trained as an architect in Canada and England, and has maintained a private practice in both Manhattan and London for the past fifteen years. She specializes in building and renovating houses in historic districts.

LAUREN CHATTMAN is a cookbook author and former professional pastry chef who has written nine books, including, most recently, Icebox Cakes. She has also collaborated with former White House pastry chef Roland Mesnier on Dessert University and with Daniel Leader on Local Breads. Her recipes have appeared in Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, Cook’s Illustrated, the New York Times, Metropolitan Home, Family Circle, and Redbook, and she has appeared on the Today show and QVC. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Sag Harbor, New York.