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Geodesic Gingerbread House Template For the Holidays
An anonymous reader writes "Buckminster Fuller eat your heart out — LA-based design firm Scout Regalia has created a mail-order template for a geodesic gingerbread house that you can make at home. When you order a Gingerbread Geodesic Dome, you will receive a cardboard template that is very simple to put together. You then bake the gingerbread and cut it into little hexagons that are then 'glued' to the dome shell with icing."
If you need a template to do this, you aren't a geometry geek.
Is it still delicious or does it taste like science? yuck
Sadly, as I found when my neice recently made multiple houses for a school project, the recommended material is "Architectural Gingerbread" which while technically edible... isn't very.
Plus the fact the she used a bottle of corn syrup so old, it didn't have a manufacturers web address on it. (expiration date was in a weird code, hard to crack with one sample)
I have a good friend who's parents live in a geodesic dome. It's an interesting living space, but the one thing to be wary of is that sounds follow the walls in sometimes unexpected ways. You can be whispering near the wall in one spot, and be heard perfectly well in an opposite part of the house or even on another floor.
So, word of warning. Use this template and you may be accidentally hear what the gumdrops say about you behind your back.
www.sci-ku.com
Seriously? 25 bucks for a pattern to make a tiny geodesic dome? I expect one of the next ten posts to contain a link to the equivalent free version whipped up in two minutes or I don't know this site anymore.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Here's a decent recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/royal-icing-recipe/index.html . The reason it calls for pasturized egg whites is there's no cooking involved and raw eggs are risky. We have used powdered egg whites http://www.google.com/search?q=powdered+egg+whites&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 (reconstituted according to directions) to good effect.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Gingerbread was last years OS, give me an Ice Cream Sandwich geodesic house template.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Now I know what to suggest the next time my kids want to do a gingerbread house. Would've been fun to do for the contest my daughter was in last year.
Any kid (at least outside the US) would immediately recognize it as a soccer-ball shape, that could simply be built out of some hand-cut hexagon- and pentagon-shaped cookies, using powdered sugar with a few drops of lemon juice as glue.
I can hardly believe that people shell out 25 bucks (plus shipping) for an over- engineered dome shape that looks anything but easy to cut out in one piece without breaking.
Anyone struggling with the template should regard the close-to-30$ cost as a fine for showing lack of DIY spirit.
It's a truncated icosahedron. Hexagons and pentagons put together. The same structure as a typical soccer ball, or the C60-molecule.
A proper gingerbread geodesic would probably be very tricky to put together as the triangles would look almost identical but have subtle differences.
The largest structure of identical triangles is the icosahedron, and it hardly looks dome-like.
A witty
You don't need pasteurised egg whites. It's the yolks that are risky. Egg whites have natural strong antibacterial properties, and can be kept at room temperature in a bowl for several days without any health issues. And after the icing dries out overnight, its basically the same as the egg white powder. I have been using fresh egg whites for icing for decades and there haven't been any problems with it. Just to be sure there are no traces of yolk in it.
I made a gingerbread ball out of hexagons as a teenager. The only difficulty was to make hexagons that were flat enough, hexgonical enough and with straight enough edges. The shape was distorted when cutting the warm gingerbread and also when it cooled down. I remember grinding the edges afterwards to get a better fit. Small distortions also created larger distortions as the ball grew (I used a lot more and smaller hexagons than they do in TFA).
Who knew there were so many food geeks here on Slashdot? When are we getting food.slashdot.org?
Egg whites aren't that risky, when I was making royal icing I started to wonder about Salmonella. A little research indicated that something like 1/30,000 factory farmed eggs in the US have Salmonella. The batch of royal icing that I made required two eggs, giving me risk of approximately 1/15k. As I'm not immunodeficient, this didn't seem too unreasonable. One can also use meringue powder, which will removed the Salmonella risk.
-- Medical student and avid baker
I have to admit that I enjoyed watching the video, and the very idea is pretty cool. I was disappointed that the cardboard support never goes away (isn't he ever going to eat the thing?) but seeing all the 'ginger snap, not gingerbread' postings above helped remind me why I keep coming back to /.
That said - the video seemed less like a video, and more like a collection of chronologically-arranged stills. I guess if you're providing the video as help, given the people making it, then you can assume that they'll all have VLC media player installed & know (or look up) the 'advance 1 frame' feature, but still.
Anyways, awesome article, regardless of my picayune carping :)
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Are raw eggs really risky anyway, or just raw eggs in the U.S. (because of nutcase factory farming practices etc)?
Around here raw eggs are very frequently consumed, but don't seem to be particularly problematic....
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Royal icing is pretty nuts stuff too. A friend had their wedding cake made with it, with a rather dense liquor-infused cake recipe (like Christmas pudding), and it's so hardy that they just mailed slices of their cake wrapped in a bit of paper to friends overseas that couldn't make the wedding!
They said that recipe could be just left sitting around the house (er, presumably covered) for months and eaten with no ill effects... [in fact, they made the cake several months in advance, so it could "age".]
We live, as we dream -- alone....
If you know your egg source, there's not much danger in a raw egg. Only eat raw eggs that didn't get wet or crapped on first (both are obvious). I try to avoid eating them raw from the store because I simply don't know where they came from (and the salmonella recalls lately have been really common) and they've been cleaned and you can't tell which started out dirty. It is thought that very few eggs actually come out of the hen with the germs inside already (I think what I read was 1 in 20,000) so if you can arrange to get unwashed eggs and only eat the clean ones raw, you're golden.
And if you're like me and raise your own chickens... well, you breath in enough crap while you're cleaning the coop that it really doesn't matter what's in the damn eggs.
I'm a she-slashdotter... but I make up for it by living with my folks.