Gingerbread Ninja

Halloween Gingerbread Inspiration

During the past few days, summer in Chicagoland quickly turned to fall. It's uncanny just how fast the chilly weather blew in last week and as a result, I can't stop thinking about Halloween gingerbread! What to make? Pirate ship? Hogwarts Castle? Spooky schoolhouse or maybe a traditional, dilapidated haunted house? If you've ever been to Disney's Haunted Mansion, you've seen a place that is full of extraordinary ideas and details that can spark your imagination. Watch this great clip and you'll get inspired.

UPDATE - The first clip I posted got disabled, so here's another one that'll get you in the Halloween mood.

World's Largest Cupcake, Part 3

I'm sure the competion was fierce, but guess which cupcake won the competition described in the previous two posts? GourmetGiftBaskets.com crushed the other entries with a cupcake of truly monster proportions, measuring some 7 ft. tall. And we saw it all come together from mixing bowl, to oven, to the plate.

The Queen of Tarts Delivers the Goods

For some really regal, colorful, creative cookie art, take a look at the online pics from the Queen of Tarts pastry shop in Toronto's Roncesvalles Village. This spectacular place is well known for humorous, hand-decorated gingerbread cookies, featured on Martha Stewart and Much Music Television, and in Elle Magazine and the Toronto Star. I like how they use traditional gingerbread boy and girl cookie cutters for the basic shapes and then freehand the people inside.

MacBook Cake and Other Gadgets

Oddly enough, this isn't the first time we've seen a sugar-coated laptop. This one's a cake and it's a Mac. The last one we featured was made out of gingerbread and it was a PC. Be sure to visit Mashable to read all about these oh-so-realistic Apple creations including an iPhone cake and Firefox cookies. 

Gingerbread Space Odyssey Complete with Monolith

Scenes from movies can inspire completely unexpected gingerbread construction, much like this one. From the Amazing Alphabet People's Coalition. See their Creative Room and website here.

"Green" Gingerbread House Features Solar Panels, Wind Turbine

Take a look at the "green" gingerbread house that Colin and his Dad constructed. Lots of valuable off-grid ideas going on here.

Mansion Hill is Paradise for Gingerbread Ideas

 

One of my sons lives in a fascinating neighborhood -- Mansion Hill in Newport, KY. Right next to the Ohio River, the neighborhood boasts old homes with pasts that run the gamut from religious institutions to speakeasys. To say the least, any of these places could inspire some mad gingerbread. We passed the huge house pictured above while walking to Pompilios, a quaint neighborhood restaurant that you might remember from the toothpick scene in the movie Rain Man. I'm picturing something similar to this place as a Halloween gingerbread mansion or, with some prettied-up details and sparkly snow, a beautiful Christmas gingerbread house. 

I've whipped up something like this in the past and I can tell you that the hardest feature is the roof structure above the turret. Any kind of roof using this sort of four-piece design is very hard to piece together, line up evenly and support while drying. Just plan on spending a lot of time on that little piece of roof. To see a similar structure in gingerbread, visit a really cool gingerbread site, Haunted Dimensions.