[piano music]
- I'm Emily Garland, and I'm a Gingerbread House Builder.
What I do know is almost entirely gingerbread replicas
of existing buildings, normally quite large scale,
but it's all edible.
[soft piano Christmas jingle]
[Emily guffaws]
Sorry. [Emily guffaws]
Okay. [Emily chuckles]
I think I actually initially got into gingerbread
because I wanted to do woodwork, but I also like baking,
and it's the perfect crossover between the two.
And as soon as I realized that you didn't have to make
just a standard shaped house, you could make anything,
then I got completely hooked.
Some of the things I get to make are epic
and I love all of them.
[light music]
[cardboard scrapping]
We're here in my kitchen studio,
which is in Hackney, in East London.
This year I've got quite a few commissions like this one,
which is a private residence, that I'm making for a family
to have as their Christmas centerpiece.
I'm just translating
my 2D drawing
into 3D cardboard.
Always takes loads of time, but then in the end,
it makes it much easier when I'm baking
to know that everything will fit together perfectly.
For me, Christmas starts the first of September.
I've had some things take three months and
then other things I can do in a couple of days
depending on the size.
All of November and December is back to back, everyday.
[Emily laughs]
Sometimes one day off a week, but rarely,
and I accidentally do it every year because it's the season.
I'm just going to put these bits together roughly,
so I can start working out the angles of the roof pieces.
Then it means I can easily take it apart again
without damaging the cardboard 'cause
I'm gonna be needing them for templates to cut around.
I'm not a trained architect, so the way I always work is to,
sort of, rough it out in cardboard and keep cutting it
until it's right.
[upbeat Christmas tune]
This is the first step of making my dough.
I'm gonna melt together all of the sugars.
Brown sugar.
Treacle.
And the syrup.
My spice mix.
Basically whenever I come across gingerbread,
in the wild, and I try it, it's not gingerly enough.
I feel really strongly that the one thing you want from it,
is that you can taste the spices.
I've adjusted the recipes over the years,
it's probably maybe at least three times
the amount of spice that they had in the original.
Well I just wanted it to taste more spicy.
My spice mix is a secret because I spent ages
changing it over time, and now I'm really happy with it.
I do tell people my recipe 'cause I love people
to build their own things out of gingerbread;
that makes me really happy, but I think the one thing
I'll keep to myself is exactly the ratio of spices
that goes into it to make it,
so that mine's always exactly mine.
I have a recipe that doesn't have any raising agent
in it, so it's got no eggs and no bicarb or anything
that would make it puff up in the oven.
That means that when I roll it really flat
and cut the shapes out, I know they'll hold
their shape in the oven, which is really important.
And it's quite strong structurally,
but not too tough to eat it. [Emily laughs]
I think it's quite a nice balance.
I spent a lot of time working on my dough recipe.
So my biggest tips for people who are starting out
trying to make a house at home would be to make sure
all of the pieces are baked to the same amount.
If you're trying to just build a gingerbread house
but one of the walls, you didn't realize was
slightly under baked, the whole thing won't work.
So I have a special rolling pin that I use
which has these rollers on, so you can changes these
to have different thicknesses.
But I have really useful, or you can use dowels
to keep it completely even as you're rolling it out.
There are some tools that I use, I think of them
more like carpentry tools now. [Emily laughs]
I've got two very good quality knives.
And then the zester, that's my favourite tool.
And I use these miniature silicon spatulas that are pointed,
which I sometimes use those as a sort of trowel,
like a brick layer might use to build a wall,
and you can pick up icing with it, but also the tip
of it means that you can really tidy up edges.
So, some of the pieces are easier to cut then others:
the smaller the piece is, the harder they are.
So, now I've cut the pieces out,
it's time to put them in the oven.
Because I cut them directly onto the sheet,
I just carefully slide it on, and then it's ready to go.
The next step is to make the glue, which is also the icing,
which is water mixed with meringue powder,
which is basically dried egg whites.
And while that's whisking together, I sift the icing sugar,
ready to put in.
The egg white in royal icing is the key ingredient
because it makes the icing completely set really solid.
What I'm do once it's completely mixed is just dye
some of it with food coloring, to sort of match
the color of the gingerbread.
Just have brown icing for all of the joints
so it makes it very, slightly less noticeable.
And then I use white for decoration and
for around the outside, and the snow,
if you want snow on the ground, that kind of thing.
So I just add the icing sugar really gradually,
and then I'm gonna whisk it on high for about five minutes.
[mixer whirring]
This consistency works really well as the glue.
[zester grating]
[utensils clanging]
This is the shape we've ended up with to fit in here,
just trying to make sure everything lines up really well.
And then my most used tool is my zester,
which I use as though, its a kind of,
like woodworkers use filing.
And I use that on almost every single joint,
because even though the biscuits baked very well
and they don't tend to spread in the oven,
I neaten them up to make them really square before I start,
also to avoid having loads of icing spill out after it.
So this is some of the icing that I have dyed brown.
I'm just gonna ice along all the exposed edges.
So I'm just gonna add this little side roof piece here.
Just gonna file these down a bit before I start.
[zester grating]
[upbeat tune]
Some pieces are small enough that they hold up on their own
which is excellent. [Emily chuckles]
When I'm doing the big pieces at the beginning,
I have to use a lot of jars and stuff to help hold it up.
The icing, although it sets really solid,
it takes a good couple of minutes before
it's got a good purchase on the pieces,
its a sort of a balance.
Once it's in place, I tend to leave things
about 24 hours before I'd say it's all completely solid,
but after that time it's surprisingly strong.
I think the icing ends up stronger than the biscuit.
[upbeat Christmas tune]
I make edible Piñatas, so the whole thing
is made out of biscuit and then full of sweets.
Whilst it's all covered in icing, it becomes really
surprisingly difficult to smash. [Emily chuckles]
This I always find fascinating because
I think almost everyone else assumes I must hate it
when my work gets destroyed, or how could I bear it
that I spent so many hours making something
only for it to be demolished.
But I actively feel the opposite: it's my favorite
bit of it, is to know that someone is going to enjoy it.
And the only way for them to properly enjoy it is to eat it,
and the only way to do that is to completely destroy it.
[hammer smashes]
It's just part of it, and I think its almost more joyful
to be making something so temporary.
I love seeing people smash them to bits.
It brings me so much joy because I know that
then they're properly enjoying it.
So depends on what kind of building I'm doing,
as to how much detail goes into each element.
I am making as good a replica of it as I can.
[zester grating]
[utensils clang]
But in the end, it is biscuit.
[light piano music]
I want to retain the, sort of, essence of the building
and so it can be instantly recognizable.
With this one, I think we are pretty close
to the real thing.
I'd say nowadays about half my work get eaten,
and half of it doesn't.
And it just stays on display, which I find quite odd,
but I still think it's important to use my same recipe
because if I wasn't making it actually delicious,
what was the point, I'd just make it out of wood
or something.
Part of the enjoyment of it is the smell
and if you have a big display piece,
I had one where it was as part of a larger exhibition hall,
and you could smell the gingerbread for meters along
before you found it.
That was really lovely, and I think that having
that smell of the real recipe is an important part
even if it's just for display.
I like to use quite a range of things to decorate
my buildings, and it always depends on the client
and what kind of finished look they want.
Sometimes people want a very, like, realistic version
of the building, in which case I would just use quite
simple colors or other types of royal icing to attach
things like bobbles and little sprinkles and things
just to make it slightly more decorative.
One of my favourite things to use though is
this edible metallic paint.
[tapping]
You can get this luster dust and you mix it with alcohol,
and the alcohol evaporates off and leaves
just the dust behind, so you can paint with it
and get some incredible finishes which I love using.
Because also I have, just from a personal point of view
about eating biscuits, I often get disappointed
if there's too much icing on the biscuit when you eating it
because you just wanna be able to taste the flavor
and I want that for my gingerbread as well,
so I like using things where it's on the surface
but you can still see the texture of the biscuit
and the color of it behind.
One of the things I like to do is, I use a lot of small dots
and edible sprinkles and balls in my work
to make the equivalent of things like stonework
and extra detailing around windows and stuff.
This is some of the bits, so I take a bit more
artistic license at this stage.
Because once you've got the feel of the whole building,
I start to try and picture it more as a finished
gingerbread piece and think about the most, sort of,
decorative, fun elements to add.
Obviously, no house had big balls of icing
to the side of the door, but it'd be nice if they did.
Sometimes, just this bits can make all the difference.
From the way it looks, you can end up having
quite a plain facade to a really Christmas-y building,
just from these few decorations,
why I enjoy this bit a lot.
[slow piano music]
It took me a long time to find my particular style
when working with gingerbread.
If I have made a London installation or something,
I will have messaging people going I know that this is you,
which is really lovely.
And I think it's that I've developed this, sort of,
look that is maybe slightly different from the norm
where I don't really overly decorate with icing,
and I like to have those clean lines
and focus on the structure of the building
as much as the decoration of it.
[Emily sighs]
Okay.
I'm not allowed.
Because if you ever earned any money from baking,
you're not allowed to apply.
So, we do always watch Biscuit Week on Bake Off,
and I find it surprisingly stressful.
I'm spending too much energy willing them on
to make sure that they don't collapse and like yeah.
It's quite energy sapping. [Emily laughs]
But I love to see it.
[ball rolling]
The one thing I still have is the same excitement
and sort of childlike enjoyment of playing with biscuits.
That's what I want to encourage other people to do it for,
because it's such a childlike joy from playing with food.
[Emily chuckles]
[soft angelic music]
[soft piano music]
[soft piano and violin music]
To anyone who's thinking of making a house this Christmas,
I would say just have loads of fun with it,
maybe try make something a little bit different
out of gingerbread, and have a really happy Christmas.
[piano music]