GINGERBREAD SPACE STATION
This year, I’m leaving planet earth for my annual gingerbread house!
Have you ever heard of gingerbread architecture suspended from the ceiling???
I certainly had not, so I loved the challenge! The other fun challenge required to make an edible version of the International Space Station is that most of the surfaces are curved, so baking the gingerbread to represent the bulk of the space station required a lot of tin foil formwork and/or curving the bread while it was fresh out of the oven and before it cooled.
There was also the challenge of scale. The International Space Station is about the size of an American football field, which means scaling it down to fit in my bay window and hanging it from the ceiling would make some elements incredibly small. It quickly became apparent that I couldn’t make a totally accurate scale model of the real International Space Station, but by using different scales for the various elements, I could still make something workable!
Non-Edible Structure
In order to hang the space station from the ceiling, I needed to create an extremely strong and lightweight structure for the cables to grab onto in the end. I opted for a grid of perforated metal channels bolted together with a few eye-hooks for the main cables. For the solar panels, I laid out a grid of super thin inedible wood supports. The main portion of the space station was made out of styrofoam cylinders and spheres, cut to reflect the different components of the actual International Space Station. A hole was drilled through each piece of styrofoam so that a 3/4” wooden dowl could be inserted to hold the components together and give me something solid to attach to the rest of the metal structure.
In order to work on this strange-shaped creation, I created a jig to hold the instruction that I ended up duct-taping to my kitchen island cart until I was ready to move the whole creation to the front of my house.
Gelatin Sheet Solar Panels
The solar panels were made out of gelatin sheets, which come with a diagonal grid pattern pressed pattern into them. I laid out a grid of super thin inedible wood supports that I painted white before gluing gelatin sheets onto them with Elmer’s glue, which is technically edible. Once the gelatin sheets were glued down I took an airbrushing machine and fed it gold edible glitter paint to make the solar panels a shimmering gold.
The Gingerbread Space Station
For the bulk of the station, I baked curved gingerbread pieces by packing tin foil into forms of half domes and half cylinders that I could lay the gingerbread on and bake. When baking gingerbread in a curve, I generally make it thicker, so that it doesn’t split on the curve as it expands. Once cooled, I could pop them off the forms and used isomalt to stick them to the non-edible structure. Then with royal frosting, I piped patterns all over the station, paying particular attention to the underside, which would be the side most people would see from the ground!
Hanging the Space Station
Hanging the space station was the most nerve-racking part of this entire project. First, I had to get the whole structure from my kitchen to my front room where it would be displayed in our bay window. No easy feat, as I live in a Victorian rowhouse with a meandering hallway, only 30” wide at its thinnest point, which meant I had the turn the space station vertically and carry it sideways. But before starting my shimmy down the hallway, I tied a loop of heavy duty cable wire around eyehooks that I had fastened to the metal arm structure of the space station. Once I complete the journey from the kitchen, a tall friend on a ladder helped loop that wire around a hook in the ceiling. We backed away slowly and gently let go until the space ship was suspended in space!
The Background
Hanging the spaceship from the ceiling of my bay window was fun, but what made it really “pop” was the background of black fabric and about 60 gingerbread start cookies that I baked, frosted, and tied onto fishing lines of various lengths. A very tedious process, definitely got through a few good podcasts while working on these! Then those lines got tied to an adjustable shower rod that hung in front of the black curtain.
Space Reindeer + Santa’s Space Suit
I really wanted to challenge myself this year and get more into chocolate and fondant work. Using a mold I poured tempered chocolate to create a sleigh, which were filled with white chocolate “Petite Fours” meant to look like presents. For the reindeer I used chocolate fondant for their bodies and white gum paste for their antlers. Their space helmets were not edible, but plastic ornamant bubbles. Santa was also made out of fondant with a special red spacesuit.
That’s one small step for a gingerbread-man, but a giant leap for gingerbread-mankind!