Geek Holiday! Make a D20 Gingerbread House

I have never in my life  made a gingerbread house, but it seemed fitting that our first one be shaped like a D20 (plus a bonus D4 and D6).

Okay, we realize this isn’t a “house”, but we weren’t really sure what else to call it. Plus it’s not actually gingerbread, it’s just graham crackers… so… “Gaming Dice Shaped Graham Cracker Structure”? That doesn’t sound as good. Anyway.

The Gingerbread D20 is a patience-trying project. Consider yourself warned. It is hard to the get the angles right, hard to get the shape to stay formed correctly, hard to get the icing to go on/stay straight, and hard to not eat while you’re making it. But after all of the frustration (and snacking), we kinda love it so wanted to share anyway.

First get some graham crackers from your s’mores stash. Graham crackers are really easy to cut – you just use a butter knife (or other lightly serrated edge) to score the cracker about halfway through, then snap it.

We used a ruler to measure each edge to the same length (2.5 inches) to make a perfect-ish triangle. Make a ton of them. At least 30, since a bunch won’t be quite right.

For the “glue” we used melted white chocolate Candy Melts. Yum. We melted the chocolate directly in ziploc bags, then cut a tiny corner of the bag off to pipe the chocolate.

The easiest way that we figured out to do this is to create 3 “domes” of 5 triangles each. Cam found a bottle cap to balance the center points of the triangles on that was just about the right height. He assembled the dome, then piped the chocolate up each seam. BE PATIENT, and hold it in place for a couple of minutes until it starts to harden. After the chocolate hardened we tried to scrape off most of the stray chocolate to clean things up.

Repeat until you have all three domes. The next step is best done with 2 people, which is why we don’t have pics. I held the domes together (there will be a large opening on the top) while Cam piped them together from the inside. Then we held everything in place for what felt like forever until they hardened (probably 4 minutes). Next, we reinforced all of the outside seams again. Put it in your fridge to really make sure it’s stuck. Last construction step is to take your leftover triangles and cover the hole – once you’re at this step it will be clear what goes where by looking at a [real] D20.

We bought a red “Icing Writer” from Michael’s to fill in the numbers. Once the Gingerbread D20 was done, we used extra graham crackers and white chocolate to make a D6 and D4, which were MUCH easier.

You might also notice the little green/red/white dice hanging out with the gingerbread gaming dice. That’s a sneak peak for a post we have coming up next week… DIY chocolate dice! That is a quick, fun, instant-gratification project that you can make a giant bowl of for your geeky friends (or use for a DIY geek gift).

Are you working on any DIY geeky/gamer holiday projects?