My brother was down for Christmas again and this year, in between the roast pork on Christmas Eve and the steak on Christmas Day, we decided to put together our first proper gingerbread house, built from scratch. We chose to build Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. The original pavilion, built as the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona, doesn’t exist anymore but it was reconstructed in the 1980s based on the original plans.
Here are photos of the real thing we saw last year in Barcelona.
The pavilion is built to scale (well, as much as is possible with gingerbread) using a blueprint we found online. It’s not made from your usual gingerbread but instead, Swedish pepparkakor, a recipe for which I used from Anne’s Food; I only halved the recipe but still had to freeze half the dough I made – the recipe makes a lot of biscuits. Very good, spiced, crisp biscuits, I should say. The pieces were put together with royal icing and gelatine sheets were used for the glass panes. It was fun… and tasty!
Further views of the structure can be seen in this Flickr photoset. If you’d like the plan we used, I’m happy to email it to you.
How were your Christmas celebrations?
Thu, 29 Dec, 2011 at 16:25
That’s brilliant! Mum and I made a gingerbread house, too, but it doesn’t have as many (or indeed, any) clean lines.
I did find the fun bit of making the house was ‘why don’t we do this?’ which I suppose you couldn’t do while following a pattern. Did you find you wanted to?
Wed, 4 Jan, 2012 at 10:48
Many thanks for the amazingly reliable posts
Wed, 4 Jan, 2012 at 11:23
OMG you are my hero! Mies van der Rohe in gingerbread is so totally inspired and so totally ROCKS!! Love it
)
Thu, 5 Jan, 2012 at 00:29
this is awesome!
hope you and your family had wonderful holidays.
Sun, 15 Jan, 2012 at 16:33
Thunderstorm Bun: I was alright this time as we had enough to worry about having everything stand up (my first time making royal icing and I had no idea whether it would hold). And it was a good challenge for my inner draftsman!
sumuc: You’re welcome.
Jeanne:
Glad you like it!
June: Thank you so much! I hope you had a great holiday season too.