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The brick roller came! The brick roller came (and I can’t get Brick House out of my head)!

Unsure as I was about the efficiency of mail order baking supply companies, I wasn’t planning on actually making any gingerbread until later in September. So I was very surprised to find a box full of commercial royal icing mix, sanding sugar and my brick roller waiting for me yesterday evening. Of course I immediately unwrapped everything. The brick roller is really cool and really tiny…which means that there will be some testing this weekend.

I ordered this set of supplies from www.sugarcraft.com. This place has everything. It’s completely and totally overwhelming and I’m fairly certain that if you got locked in their warehouse for a couple of nights you could survive off of the fondant and sugar sprinkles.

I need to take the time here–before anything has been built–to provide disclosure of intent. I’m not an engineer or an architect or a contractor . Mention the words sine and cosine and my palms get a little clammy. The term tongue and groove makes me giggle. I’m also not a gingerbread purist. So, all you cookie snobs out there who expect me to construct this thing completely out of gingerbread and royal icing can just stop reading now. While I have the very best intentions (I do scour each month’s issue of Dwell after all), I also have no qualms about utilizing support structures to maintain the structural integrity of this baby. Foam blocks, tin foil and perhaps even chicken wire are all my friends. And, like any good friend, I plan to use, exploit and manipulate them accordingly. I do promise to keep things as edible as possible. But, at least in this builder’s case, I’m going to need all the help I can get.

A cat…a cat…my foam board model for a cat…

Seriously though. This weekend was project: see if the templates you pulled out of your ass actually fit together into a facsimile of Royce Hall.

After stocking up on some foam board, masking tape and new drafting rulers (I never pass up the opportunity to buy a new drafting ruler—I use them for everything from sewing to baking to actually measuring things), I was set to begin construction. Oh—have to give a shout-out to the Graph Aides art supply shop in Westchester. They were hopping on Saturday because the adjacent Otis Art School began classes today. Students were getting 20% off and since I live in the neighborhood and the owner guy recognized me, I got 20% off as well. Thanks artistic guy with equally artistic though geographically unidentifiable Latin accent!

It took me about two hours to measure and cut out the pieces. Let me just say that foam board is not as much fun to cut as I remember. Let me also just say that nothing gets me more in the holiday mood than cutting foam board in my 90 degree kitchen in August while sweat drips down my face. Evil as it is however, foam board is about the same thickness as gingerbread, so I didn’t have a choice. It took maybe another 30 minutes to construct the monstrosity (again, not including the roofs).

Here is what I came up with:

Front view:

Front view from side:

Side view:

Back:

Notes and lessons learned:

• I need to decide which windows will be cut and which ones to fake-out (and how to fake them out).
• The towers need to be increased in width by .25” for the front and back facing panels to allow for the thickness of the gingerbread.
• Roofs will need to be measured, baked and then installed after entire building is constructed in order to get good fit.
• I’m going to have to use some higher level geometry to figure out how to make the pyramid roofs for the front towers. Maybe I’ll take the diagram over to the math department.

Next steps:

This week I’m going to update my templates and begin cutting them out of tag board. Merry, merry!