redcrab studio
Gingerbread

Every year me and my brother builds a gingerbread house for christmas.


There is something special about gingerbread as media. Everything is so brittle that the whole project can be ruined any second, hour or month. Under constant threat from moist air, curios children, dogs and vibrations.

  To be honest gingerbread is a very bad construction material (even for being a cookie) and that's exactly what keeps us coming back to this stupid artform. We're just too curious to see if the next idea really will work out.


These projects wasn't initially meant for an audience but we have always documented them quite well for the reasons mentioned above.  Nowadays we definitely have a faithful audience, but we still makes this only for our own pleasure and always will.


Do we have any rules? No, not really - why should we?

Nevertheless, we would never use any kinds of hidden reinforcements or alien materials. To use merely gingerbread is the whole point! In order to keep to the subject "gingerbread house" the motif always includes a building or at least something to call a home.


At the bottom of this page you find a small FAQ section and the super secret, almost magic dough recipe!!


Gingerbread Winter Garden 2023

(a.k.a. Gingerbread star with lots of icing)


This years house is in fact a joke. People (sometimes including Sverker) keeps on nagging about why there's so sparse decoration on our gingerbread houses. The simple answer to that is "because it's harder". We claim that you can hide almost any flaw in the gingerbread construction by covering it in sugar and candy. -So we made a whole house without gingerbread just to prove that! Except for that decorative star at the top. It is a gingerbread house after all. :)


Check out the video to see it more thoroughly and some of the baking process.

Gingerbread Ferris Wheel 2021

To make our gingerbread constructions moving has always been a dream. The problem is that cookie in fact is a very bad construction material. Sugar is stronger and more durable but tend to be sticky after a while. Pasta on the other hand feels like the material of the future in eatable mechanics! In this project we used no less than four different kinds of pasta to make spindles and bearings. The rest is normal gingerbread as usual.


Check out the video to see it in action and some of the baking process.

Planet Gingerbread 2020

This year we went for a whole cookie planet with no less than 50 small houses around it. In order to do so we made our own cookie cutters. It seemed so simple to do, but there is 33 different actions for each house before it’s cut, trimmed and assembled. That means 1650 tasks just for the houses!  It took a while 😅 The globe was more of a technical challenge. Each house is lit from leds underneath and evenly spread inside the house by a clear candy caramel.


Check out the video to see it more thoroughly and some of the baking process.

2D Gingerbread House 2019

Virtual reality and 3D feels SO 2010's! We go for "less is more" and enter the new decade with a gingerbread house in full 2D.

  The goal here was to make an image in four shades of brown, and in order to do that it turned out we needed four different dough. The hardest part actually was do make cookies that remained black even after baking!

  This piece is backlit by a white LED-screen. The stars and the fire are just holes, while the windows and the moon are lit through white gingerbread.


Check out the video to see it more thoroughly and some of the baking process.

Gingerbread Marble Run 2018

This one is the craziest experiment yet. An automatic marblerun made entirely in gingerbread, complete with an alternating diverter gate . It felt more obvious than ever that gingerbread isn't the greatest construction material as this one depends on precision down to millimeters to work! The same goes for chocolate marbles from ICA by the way - they are very uneven in this context. 😄 But we got it together and had very much fun while doing so!


Everything on top of the base is gingerbread except for one little piece of spaghetti in the gate. The marbles are pushed up from underneath through the tower by a mechanism I figured out just for this.


Check out the video to see it in action and some of the baking process.

Gingerbread UFO 2017

This time the gingerbread itself is quite straight forward (of course without stupid reinforcements or whatever) but we mounted it on a mirror to achieve the feeling of levitation! On top of that the mirror is carefully sandblasted to let light though,  to create the illusion of the beam, decoration lights in the tree and so on. Yes, we're very proud of this seemingly new idea! The photo-shooting session of this thing was a real struggle as we're talking about a mirror. Outside. In December.. You can imagine.


Check out the video to see it in action and some of the baking process.

Gingerbread Treehouse 2016

This year we went for as tiny pieces as possible resulting in a tree made up of some 300 branches, each one as narrow as a match. The tree trunk and the big branches are of course hollow and made in two matching halves each. The whole thing is about 50cm high.


This one is the first project to get a video presentation (although most of the “behind the scenes” footage are still images)

Grand Tour 2005-2015

Put together during the silent year of 2022

If you like the video presentations of recent years - here’s one that covers the projects between 2005 and 2015. It has much more content on each project than shown elsewhere, and everything is in 4k.

Julia the Gingerbread Houseboat 2015

After discovering the joy of making planks last year we wanted to take that further. This boat is built just like a real wooden boat with bent planks. I think it’s safe to say we use more tools from the garage than from the kitchen, and to our delight we actually had good use for laser while doing this! 😁 The hull is split by a sheet of glass representing the water surface.
The boat consists of about 100 pieces and is approximately 40cm long. The rope to the buoy is the narrowest gingerbread part measuring just 1,5mm. The sign, the ropes for the tires and other "lines" are brown dyed icing.

Gingerbread Construction Site 2014

The idea is quite simple here: making a house "in the making" with planks and gadgets like a concrete mixer. The execution was not that simple though as this requires much more strength in the gingerbread. The first few attempts were simply too affected by gravity and moved slowly towards the center of the earth.

Pepparkakshusvagn 2013

This gingerbread caravan is merely a pun (as the Swedish word for it would be like “gingerbread house-wagon”) with a rather advanced car in front of it. A cartoonish interpretation of a Volvo PV baked on moulds that (to our great surprise) self destucted in the oven! That means we only had one try. In hindsight I can say It was pure luck we pulled that of 😅
Everything is hollow, and there is no reinforcements or cheating. Just pure gingerbread, plus some LEDs and gelatine sheets for windows. The detailing is brown dyed sugar icing.

Gingerbread Tortoise 2012

This one is quite a stretch.  What is a gingerbread house? We claim that a shell is some kind of “housing” at least. 😊
While the shell is mathematically calculated by Sverker, the rest is just freestyle building with different curved shapes.

Gingerbread Volcano 2011

This volcano has transparent lava streams made of caramel. Behind those sits an arrangement of 100 red leds in a “running light” making the lava move. Good idea. Terrible execution! Next 😁

The Fearsome Lion 2010

There’s no message here. I just wanted to make something narrow and airy like a cage, and a lion happens to be just right colour wise

Lucia with tiny Gingerbread House 2009

Poor Saint Lucia is an underrated character in the confusing mix of various religious components and commerce this time of year. The body is made of lots of stacked gingebreads while the head is hollow. The candles are small LED's decorated with icing and sugar. The hair and all other decorations is normal icing too. The tiny house is just 15mm wide.

Fibre optic Merry-go-round 2008

All those spots of light comes from the same source via optical fibres. This means about 500 holes had to be drilled too :) The dots of icing between the holes just reflects the light coming from the fibre ends barely peeking out. A quite nice illusion, isn't it?

Gingerbread Hermit Crab 2007

This hermit crab was rushed together my first winter in Stockholm just because "there has to be a gingerbread house every christmas". I contributed it to the annual contest at

Museum of Architecture just for fun, and despite the fact that the "house" is just a paper cone  it got the "public's choice award"


The sandy background is just Photoshop.

Gingerbread Lighthouse 2006

Most of this construction is made of pieces cut to shape after baking, and built piece by piece without a detailed plan. The whole thing is about 80cm tall. There is one lightbulb in the beacon and another one inside the house. The windows are gelatine sheets. 


I entered ICA-Kurrirens gingerbread contest with this and WON! Hooray!

Gingerbread Igloo 2005

This igloo is baked around tin-cans in big convex shapes. Not in tiles as the decoration suggests. There's about four pieces per dome as you can't bake the dough vertical in the oven.


There has of course been several interesting gingerbread houses prior to this one during the years. A knight fighting a dragon, a natural sized Ukulele, a Donkey Kong-diorama to mention a few but I think the internet will do fine without them :) 

FAQ:

Q: How big?
A: We are interested in details and precision rather than large scale. The size of a regular oven tray usually dictates the size of the largest single construction piece.


Q: How long does it take?
A: Frankly we don't know! This usually starts out as a technical idea and some experimenting with chocolate marbles, light sources or whatever. Then we try to meet up as often we get the chance to work together for some hours at a time. The whole process often takes weeks.


Q: How did it all start?
A: Our beloved mother Ulla-Karin made Gingerbread houses with us when we were small kids in the mid 80's. After some years we could handle more and more by ourselves, and the concepts got wilder and wilder. Regular houses isn't very challenging after all. :)

  After some years of living in different cities we have found out that this strange hobby is the perfect reason to meet up and do this together, and so we did from 2011 and onwards.


Q: When do you eat it?
A: The houses are of course eatable. We even use the spices for that special Christmas scent, but we leave the houses standing for as long as they make it. None of us normally eat anything that stood in the open air collecting dust for weeks..


Q: What magic dough do you use?
A: This is the recipe we used for at least the past ten years. In Swedish because it just makes sense:

Receptet på pepparkaksdeg:


3,5dl socker
2dl sirap
100g margarin
1msk kanel
1msk ingefära
3dl mjölk
0,5msk bikarbonat
14-17dl mjöl


Smält smör och blanda ner allt utom mjöl och bikarbonat. Låt svalna. Tillsätt mjöl (utblandat med bikarbonat) tills den släpper från bunken. Låt vila i kylskåp minst några dagar.