Geodesic Gingerbread House Template For the Holidays 61
An anonymous reader writes "Buckminster Fuller eat your heart out — LA-based design firm Scout Regalia has created a mail-order template for a geodesic gingerbread house that you can make at home. When you order a Gingerbread Geodesic Dome, you will receive a cardboard template that is very simple to put together. You then bake the gingerbread and cut it into little hexagons that are then 'glued' to the dome shell with icing."
Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
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Pretty sure the template is for ease of construction, not a how-to-make-sides-that-fit-together.
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The point is, given the materials, you should be able to make a template yourself from scratch in under half an hour.
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Most witches aren't. Their skills don't go far beyond pentagrams.
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Keziah Mason [wikipedia.org] being an exception...
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Yes. I am so sure that Paris Hilton is just dying to put one of these together.
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OK, so she passes one of the more basic geek tests. Fails the gender test, of course.
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To paraphrase Terra Nova - Cooking is like science, except when you're finished you get a treat!
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architectural gingerbread (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, as I found when my neice recently made multiple houses for a school project, the recommended material is "Architectural Gingerbread" which while technically edible... isn't very.
Plus the fact the she used a bottle of corn syrup so old, it didn't have a manufacturers web address on it. (expiration date was in a weird code, hard to crack with one sample)
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And here I thought "Internet Time" was based on the UNIX epoch. After all, POSIX time has been employed by Internet infrastructure since before the World Wide Web, whereas Swatch Internet Time is displayed on wrist-watches that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Internet and are used by nobody.
Anywho, Swatch Time does not seem to include a date component, so you probably won't find it used for expiration warnings. Or anything else.
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Whoooooosh..
Re:architectural gingerbread (Score:5, Informative)
You should use gingersnap dough instead of gingerbread.
Gingersnaps are usually baked as a drop or ball cookie, like a peanut butter cookie is.
If you instead roll the dough out flat and even on the cookie sheet, and bake a little bit slower to avoid being burned on the outside and raw in the middle (drop baking temp down to something like 250 or 275F, instead of 350F, and bake a little longer) then when you remove the "super cookie" from the oven you can cut it with cookie cutters while it is still hot.
When it cools, it will be quite firm, and perfectly edible. Crispy and hard, actually, hence the name "ginger snap".
You have to cut on removal from the oven, and not before baking, because they are a drop cookie and expand while baking.
sounds inside (Score:5, Funny)
So, word of warning. Use this template and you may be accidentally hear what the gumdrops say about you behind your back.
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I weep for the nerd community I once knew (Score:5, Insightful)
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And with the advent of the maker bot I believe we will finally see the Year Of The Gingerbread Desktop.
FTFY
Re:I weep for the nerd community I once knew (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.geo-dome.co.uk/article.asp?uname=modelbuild [geo-dome.co.uk]
Re:I weep for the nerd community I once knew (Score:5, Informative)
All you need are hexagons and pentagons with equal length faces. Automatically assemble into a closed, regular shell.
(Looks exactly like a soccer ball.) No leet geometry skillz required.
A sheet of fresh gingerbread, some cookie cutters, and a pastry bag full of stiff ftosting, and off you go.
(Personally, I would use gingersnap cookie dough, as ginger snaps are sturdier than ginger bread. This would negate most of the need for a cardboard support.)
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Yeah, true that. (Shrug)
Now, if they asked for a regular icosahedron set, that requires some leet geometry, because the triangles are not equilateral. :)
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"Regular" means all the faces are the same. A soccerball is not a regular solid, because it is made from 2 different shapes.
A regular triangle has 3 identical sides, yes. However, this tesselates on a flat plane, and does not form a closed solid. This is why the triangles have to not be equilateral for a regular icosahedron.
A regular icosahedron is made from the same slightly acute angle triangular face on every face. This is why it is a regular solid.
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wrong. these are not exact equilateral hexagons and pentagons, this is what's called a frequency-2 geodesic, so there are two lengths of sides, roughly 7:8 ratio. exact pentagons and hexagons won't line up, try it.
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I have done so digitally several times.
Produces a soccer ball. See for instance, this unfolded pattern.
http://montrealzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/unfolded-soccer-ball-2.jpg [montrealzen.com]
Notice that all the shapes have equal length faces.
Re:I weep for the nerd community I once knew (Score:5, Insightful)
It is in fact made of equilateral hexagons and pentagons. What it isn't made up of is true equilateral triangles. Each triangle face is slightly elongated so that the vertex of the triangle is raised above the plane of the hexagon/pentagon so that the resulting vertex is on the same circumscribed sphere that the hexagon/pentagon vertexes are on. That results in two different lengths of chords in the final dome, but all of the chords forming hexagons and pentagons in the base 'soccer ball' will be equilateral.
Note that the gingerbread pattern isn't a true geodesic dome, as it is made up of just the hexagons and pentagons, not the subdivided triangles. So a gingerbread dome-home made from the http://www.geo-dome.co.uk/ [geo-dome.co.uk] pattern would be more impressive and satisfying to the pedantic nerds here on /.
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I agree, the triangle based pattern would be more impressive. The prior AC, however, is just plain wrong. :)
The triangle based one, as upposed to the "buckyball soccerball" one would also be much more work, and would require leet geometry skillz. (Hence, the greater geek street cred.)
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$25 for just the pattern is a bit much. I mean, I get the fact that effort and thought went in to this, but $25 is a tad high.
If you're going to do this you need "royal icing" (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a decent recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/royal-icing-recipe/index.html [foodnetwork.com] . The reason it calls for pasturized egg whites is there's no cooking involved and raw eggs are risky. We have used powdered egg whites http://www.google.com/search?q=powdered+egg+whites&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 [google.com] (reconstituted according to directions) to good effect.
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Are raw eggs really risky anyway, or just raw eggs in the U.S. (because of nutcase factory farming practices etc)?
Around here raw eggs are very frequently consumed, but don't seem to be particularly problematic....
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If you know your egg source, there's not much danger in a raw egg. Only eat raw eggs that didn't get wet or crapped on first (both are obvious). I try to avoid eating them raw from the store because I simply don't know where they came from (and the salmonella recalls lately have been really common) and they've been cleaned and you can't tell which started out dirty. It is thought that very few eggs actually come out of the hen with the germs inside already (I think what I read was 1 in 20,000) so if you
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Royal icing is pretty nuts stuff too. A friend had their wedding cake made with it, with a rather dense liquor-infused cake recipe (like Christmas pudding), and it's so hardy that they just mailed slices of their cake wrapped in a bit of paper to friends overseas that couldn't make the wedding!
They said that recipe could be just left sitting around the house (er, presumably covered) for months and eaten with no ill effects... [in fact, they made the cake several months in advance, so it could "age".]
Gingerbread was last year. (Score:2)
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Hmm. I wonder can you get fudge sticks to work in a glue gun? Maybe Cadbury's Finger of Fudge bars would do. Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart...
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Nice idea (Score:1)
It's not a geodesic dome! (Score:1)
It's a truncated icosahedron. Hexagons and pentagons put together. The same structure as a typical soccer ball, or the C60-molecule.
A proper gingerbread geodesic would probably be very tricky to put together as the triangles would look almost identical but have subtle differences.
The largest structure of identical triangles is the icosahedron, and it hardly looks dome-like.
Done that... (Score:2)
I made a gingerbread ball out of hexagons as a teenager. The only difficulty was to make hexagons that were flat enough, hexgonical enough and with straight enough edges. The shape was distorted when cutting the warm gingerbread and also when it cooled down. I remember grinding the edges afterwards to get a better fit. Small distortions also created larger distortions as the ball grew (I used a lot more and smaller hexagons than they do in TFA).
Food geeks unite (Score:2)
Who knew there were so many food geeks here on Slashdot? When are we getting food.slashdot.org?
Video != list of still images (Score:2)
I have to admit that I enjoyed watching the video, and the very idea is pretty cool. I was disappointed that the cardboard support never goes away (isn't he ever going to eat the thing?) but seeing all the 'ginger snap, not gingerbread' postings above helped remind me why I keep coming back to /.
That said - the video seemed less like a video, and more like a collection of chronologically-arranged stills. I guess if you're providing the video as help, given the people making it, then you can assume that th