Did you ever make gingerbread houses as a kid? Yours may have featured Twizzlers trimming the roofs, gumdrops lining the front walkways, and a candy cane mailbox posts. I'm sure they were lovely, but the Biscuiteer, a London-based cookie company, just made a gingerbread house that blows any cookie home you ever created out of the water.
It all started 15 long months ago when the United Kingdom's National Trust commissioned a gingerbread replica of the Waddesdon Manor. The real-life manor was built in the late 1800s for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild's art collection. Yes, this fancy man had a mansion just for his art. If you're a fan of British accents and historically-inspired television, you might recognize the manor's exterior from popular shows like Downton Abbey and The Queen.
Like any good neo-Renaissance architectural gem, the IRL manor has an elaborate design and intricate detailing, making it quite complicated to recreate in biscuit form. According to House Beautiful, 240 eggs, 66 pounds of butter and sugar, and 480 pounds of icing went into the model. The resulting structure is six feet long and contains only gingerbread and icing — no non-edible filler or supports. And it wasn't just the outside of the manor that the Biscuiteers replicated. The interior, with its famous art collection and baroque decor, was also reproduced. In all, it took 500 hours to make, and luckily you can take a tour of the manor here. Trust us, it will make you wish your were a little gingerbread baron or baroness.
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