HAUNTED GINGERBREAD
Baker’s book puts fun, flavour into artful projects,
What happens when a graphic-designer-turned-pastry-chef, with a keen eye for architecture, sets her sights on the old-fashioned gingerbread house?
Home improvement has likely never been so fanciful — and definitely not as delicious.
Catherine Beddall, an instructor in a professional pastry program, has raised the roof with awe- (and “aww -”) inducing creations, such as pastel birdhouses, candy-filled houses with surprise concealed compartments, and even a Halloween haunted house.
“I love cake books, with so many beautiful designs,” says Catherine Beddall, who teaches in the culinary arts program at Ottawa’s Algonquin College and who has a sideline business making wedding cakes. “It seemed to me that maybe I could replicate that with gingerbread houses, making them a bit more modern.”
Beddall is being modest. The woman who won the first gingerbread house contest she entered, then won a national championship the next year, has reinvented the form with her book, The Magic of Gingerbread (Peter Pauper Press).
It includes 16 original creations, from a ring of cookies that forms a gorgeous candle-holder centrepiece, to an entire chess set, all made of gingerbread.
Even more remarkable, the book makes these projects approachable for even the novice baker, with a foolproof gingerbread recipe that actually tastes great, templates to trace and disaster-averting advice.
“People shouldn’t be intimidated,” Beddall says as she calmly welds two roof pieces together with royal icing.
“Anyone can bake and decorate a gingerbread house. I know those pre-made kits may seem easier, but most are made with so many preservatives, they taste like cardboard and could break your teeth.”
Beddall, 41, the mother of two preteen daughters, trained in graphic arts. But she loved baking early on, taught by her grandmother.
When one of her friends got married about 15 years ago, Beddall made the cake. “I had no intention of making baking a career,” she says, but soon orders for her beautiful tiered and decorated wedding cakes started arriving.
It was after she made a ladybug cake for her eldest daughter’s first birthday, however, that she really caught the creative baking bug, 11 years ago. Soon, her wedding-cake hobby had blossomed into a birthday-cake business.
Beddall decided to go back to Algonquin College, where she had studied graphic design, to become a professional pastry chef.
Her glossy book was published by a New York-based company, but Beddall not only designed and baked the 16 gingerbread creations in the book, she took all 226 photographs, did the writing and even designed the step-by-step layout, which shows everything from the recommended icing tips and baking pans to the range of colours of “doneness” as gingerbread bakes.
“In many, many hours spent testing gingerbread techniques in my own kitchen, I’ve learned what methods work best,” says Beddall, who says she takes from three to 40 hours to make a gingerbread house.
She figures she’s made 50 to 60 gingerbread houses since winning the contests five years ago, selling them for $20 to $200.
“Most people don’t think about gingerbread until closer to Christmas, but I’m hoping to show projects that are good year-round. I’ve also got a gluten-free gingerbread recipe — you can’t even tell the difference — and so many more ideas I’d like to do.”