HOW DELIGHTFULLY DIFFICULT IS IT... to design the perfect, applause-worthy gingerbread house? Anyone who has attempted to put together a pastry-riffic structure knows that the challenges go well beyond making four walls stand together, with the aid of some icing, in a nicely square form. And not every gingerbread house takes the shape of a square with a pitched roof, after all; there are gingerbread spaceships and castles and boats, meaning dreamers do go beyond the traditional form. But gingerbread construction, like all construction, takes science, and engineering, and math, and all of the principles of STEM flowing through the culinary, picture-cute project. To see why this is so, and to eye the gingerbread houses created by a several Southern Californian kids and families, best make like a gumdrop and roll for...
THE DISCOVERY CUBE OF ORANGE COUNTY... in Santa Ana. That's where the Science of Gingerbread is now open, through Sunday, Dec. 31, and that's where a number of good-enough-to-eat buildings are now on display. Entries are still open for the gingerbread house competition — that wraps on Sunday, Dec. 3 — but even if you don't enter, you and your children can swing by to participate in a Gingerbread Derby or to see Santa, who'll be ho, ho, ho-ing at the science-minded institution on select days throughout December. If you like your science outings to be spicily scented, and covered in candy, and have a more than a hint of the holidays to them, this is a display to browse as the end of the year rolls closer (rolls like the aforementioned gumdrop).
