Ah, the holiday gingerbread house. A traditional — if tedious — treat; tasking to create, delicious to dismantle, so why not try applying some maker skills to making the job of building it easier? [William Osman] decided to try two unorthodox approaches to the gingerbread construct; first, he opted to build a gingerbread mobile home. Secondly, he cut the pieces out with a laser cutter.
After the tumultuous task of baking the gingerbread sheets, [Osman] modeled the trailer in SolidWorks and set to work cutting it out on his home-built, 80W laser cutter. Twice. Be sure to double check the home position on any laser cutting you do, lest you ruin your materials. Also — though this might be especially difficult when modelling food in any CAD programs — be sure to account for the thickness of your materials, otherwise you’ll end up with a lot of trimming on your hands. At least gingerbread cuts easily.
Hot glue and royal frosting secured the pieces together — as well as some improvisation of the final details — making for a picture perfect holiday scene — from a certain point of view.
If you try laser cutting your food, keep it out of the refrigerator or you may find everything infused with a burnt flavour. Still, the potential for dazzling complexity in one’s gingerbread creations makes this an appealing option for anyone with the moxie to try it.
Don’t try to laser-cut bologna. There was…an incident with that at college. Just don’t do it, okay?
hahahahha
Every year when the kids were young my wife would make with them a grand gingerbread house that was not much smaller than a standard dollhouse, in fact employing a number of auxiliary items from the latter in the constrution. However none of them would eat any of it, so I have a vivid memory of finding chunks packed in my lunch all of January and most of February as dessert. I must have eaten well over a dozen of these in total over the years they were making them.
Hot glue? On something meant to be edible? Is that such a great idea?
There are edible hot glues made of sugars used in the confection industry.
On the other hand, I’m not certain I’d really want to eat the laser-cut/burnt edges anyway
Caramel is one of the more obvious easy to do at home ones I can think of. In this case, non-edible hot glue was used to hold things together.
Shame he didn’t use that type..
I read the comments, then watched the video..
Yep.. Normal molten plastic type hot glue.
Rubber/plastic hot glue isn’t exactly toxic. No more toxic than the mountains of plastics you are exposed to daily, and the cocktail of degraded polymers found in pretty much all living things anyway.
It’d be annoying to pick off the bits of rubber, though. Then again, I find that gingerbread structures aren’t really about eating.
If ever terecwas a reason to own a laser cutter, this was it.