Gingerbread Wat

Edit: Ginger Wat was JULIA's idea. JULIA's.

There was a gingerbread house study break recently in the dorm. Jen had asked me to go as part of our night of exciting things (!), plus I kind of wanted to go anyway, so I said I’d see her there. Since I actually had time to think about the fact that I was going to it, I had time to think of ways to “do it wrong.” In the early evening I had thought about building a replica of F. L. Wright’s “Falling Water” (Waters?), but upon inspecting the plans of that, decided it would be nigh on impossible to make a recognizable facsimile from the materials at hand. I think because of the painting Julia had made for me, I thought of making a gingerbread model of Angkor Wat instead. I got a few nice pictures of it up on my computer, and we went upstairs when it was time.

The crew consisted of Jen, Haley, Julia, Matt, Nick M, and myself. Matt and Nick both have engineering backgrounds, so that was nice. We were given a paper plate as a foundation, but we immediately knew that was NOT good enough. So I went to my room and got the base piece of cardboard from the pizza box Tarik and I had used last night. The person running the program thought we were kind of crazy, but we knew it was worth it.

We worked on the border first, using the graham crackers they provided. Jen and Haley worked on the inside square pagoda, which we realized was not going to be sufficiently tall at some point, so they needed to work on yet another base for it, and then a support column, which Matt and Nick also helped with. I worked on the spires with Julia, which were made out of Dots, and when that was finished, Julia used my Pokey Sticks to make the columns, and a candy cane to make the gate.

We were the last ones there. When we were done, it actually did look somewhat convincingly like Angkor Wat. Julia made a banner/plaque for it, two graham crackers next to each other, covered with white frosting, with “ANGKOR WAT” written in red, and a line of nerds at the top.

When we were done…

We decided we were the coolest.

Peace out.