Greetings and Salutations, Instapunderati! Thank you for visiting.
I love gingerbread, the spicier the better. Aachener Printen with bits of candied ginger? Yum. Ginger cake with double the spices and Guinness (or any good stout) in the dough? Excellent. Cleaning stuck gingerbread out of molds for making gingerbread houses? Ah, no thanks, but I appreciate the offer.
So when I see things like the following, I admire the artistry and engineering, and have zero desire to try them at home.
High Gothic is always appropriate. Fair Use under Creative Commons 3.0, original source is:http://church-ladies.blogspot.com/2007/11/little-baking-project-for-advent.html
The next one is fudging things a bit by using a laser cutter, but it’s still impressive.
If you are wondering how they got it off the floor and moved to its final destination, I have the same question. Fair Use under Creative Commons 3.0. Original source: https://hackaday.io/project/8660/gallery#88fbf29139c9b487ed3d342578e065b6
Too much Gothic? Hmm, how about something a touch more Orthodox?
St. Basil’s, Moscow, done by a chef at the Ritz-Carelton Moscow. Original Story: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/12/25/russia.cathedral.gingerbread/index.html
And this one is from Canada:
The original news story: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/gingerbread-cathedral-a-labour-of-love-for-baker-1.1268795
Cat Rotator's Quarterly 
(Very quickly hides the lebkuchen recipe that was about to get mixed. Nothing to see, here.)
Those are gorgeous, and my real interest is in how they handled the colored sugar for stained glass. It’d take a Cromwell to publicly eat one of those confection. Have the demo crew work bbn out of sight, please.
I wonder if the windows in the laser-cut one are sheets of gelatin with colored LEDs behind them.
On the last one, I think you can get the effect by melting Jolly Rancher candies and letting them spread very, very thin. Still, it’d be very delicate work.
Melting sugar-crystals like you would pony beads (common craft, you can search for examples, biggest issue is finding a frame and tin foil would work) is my guess.
https://onelittleproject.com/melted-bead-ornaments/
Those are ‘almost’ too pretty to eat… Almost… 🙂
Probably too dense and baked too hard to be very tasty.
But I’m sure they still smell lovely.
I know what I’m going to cook in a wee bit. I have a bottle of Guinness handy, and that sounds like a worthwhile experiment.
https://prettysimplesweet.com/stout-gingerbread-cake/ This is a similar recipe, although I’ve also seen some that use boxed gingerbread mix as the starter, and add more Stout to the frosting.
I have a similar recipe that uses a pint of strong, dark coffee which also works well. I tried both liquids, and either way the cake is dark, moist, spongy, and a spicy triumph in ginger. Most of the sliced cake from Friday is still there, honest … well, better leave that piece for breakfast.
There are recipes for.making sugar “glass,” and it is paintable with food coloring. Or you can just make it in different colors. (But usually people paint it.)
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