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."

Comments

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need a template to do this, you aren't a geometry geek.

architectural gingerbread

[Kaenneth]

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)

Re:architectural gingerbread

[wierd_w]

You should use gingersnap dough instead of gingerbread.

Gingersnaps are usually baked as a drop or ball cookie, like a peanut butter cookie is.

If you instead roll the dough out flat and even on the cookie sheet, and bake a little bit slower to avoid being burned on the outside and raw in the middle (drop baking temp down to something like 250 or 275F, instead of 350F, and bake a little longer) then when you remove the "super cookie" from the oven you can cut it with cookie cutters while it is still hot.

When it cools, it will be quite firm, and perfectly edible. Crispy and hard, actually, hence the name "ginger snap".

You have to cut on removal from the oven, and not before baking, because they are a drop cookie and expand while baking.

sounds inside

[sci-ku]

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.

I weep for the nerd community I once knew

[paiute]

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.

Re:I weep for the nerd community I once knew

[RandomAvatar]

Here you go. replace paper with cardboard, and glue with icing. It is a little different, but has the same result. You may also want to cut out some extra pieces, but that shouldn't be too hard.
http://www.geo-dome.co.uk/article.asp?uname=modelbuild

Re:I weep for the nerd community I once knew

[wierd_w]

All you need are hexagons and pentagons with equal length faces. Automatically assemble into a closed, regular shell.
(Looks exactly like a soccer ball.) No leet geometry skillz required.

A sheet of fresh gingerbread, some cookie cutters, and a pastry bag full of stiff ftosting, and off you go.

(Personally, I would use gingersnap cookie dough, as ginger snaps are sturdier than ginger bread. This would negate most of the need for a cardboard support.)

Re:I weep for the nerd community I once knew

[harperska]

It is in fact made of equilateral hexagons and pentagons. What it isn't made up of is true equilateral triangles. Each triangle face is slightly elongated so that the vertex of the triangle is raised above the plane of the hexagon/pentagon so that the resulting vertex is on the same circumscribed sphere that the hexagon/pentagon vertexes are on. That results in two different lengths of chords in the final dome, but all of the chords forming hexagons and pentagons in the base 'soccer ball' will be equilateral.

Note that the gingerbread pattern isn't a true geodesic dome, as it is made up of just the hexagons and pentagons, not the subdivided triangles. So a gingerbread dome-home made from the http://www.geo-dome.co.uk/ pattern would be more impressive and satisfying to the pedantic nerds here on /.

If you're going to do this you need "royal icing"

[elwinc]

If you're going to do this you need something called "royal icing." Ordinary icing stays soft and goey. Royal icing hardens up almost like hard candy overnight.

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.