Edible Homes

In the process of developing my adapted tale for Hansel and Gretel, told from the perspective of the architect who designed the original edible house, I googled the term 'Fairytale Recipes' and wound up at this amazing craft blog. Ulla Norup Milbrath aka Ullabenulla is a crafty Jack-of-all-trades who teaches a wide range of classes including one where students make their own fairytale recipe books. The playful, roughly made collage books on Ulla's blog inspired me to make a big scrapbook size collage book that will go with my adapted tale and model gingerbread house in the exhibition. Excuse the cropped photos.

For a tactile, edible looking cover design I used gingham contact paper over anaglypta wallpaper with colouful felt letters on top.


My inside tiltle page used the headers from a 1960s recipe book and a combination of foam, paper and plastic letters.



In his dreams Jack lived in a banana chew house on Lolly-Jar Lane.
The snow was white icing and the rain was fizzy lemonade.

The birds built their nests from chocolate twigs and rolled their eggs in powdered sugar.
In his dreams Else and Lil Kelvey from the chilly chalk house
lived in a cosy mushroom cottage with a peppermint garden.


On the edge of the city there was a coconut castle with four high towers and a biscuit drawbridge.

The shopping mall in the city centre was a chocolate sandwich cake with cherries on top


and the tallest building in town was Frankies Wedding Cake Hotel with edible roses on every floor.

In his dreams Jack found the gingerbread house in the middle of the deep dark forest.
He fixed it up and made himself at home. And there he lived

happily and greedily ever after.
THE END

Image credits:

The boy in the bed is an illustration by Ezra Jack Keats from a battered picture book I found recently and the snowy scenes are by Richard Scarry. The lolly jars came from a recent photo-spread in Frankie magazine as did the images of the lovely ceramic dolls made by Argentinean artist Paola Zakimi. I hope she won't mind that I turned them into Else and Lil Kelvey, the poor sisters from my favourite Katherine Mansfield story, ' The Doll's House.' The pretty fabric birds are by English textile artist Emily Sutton, and the images came from a feature article in a World of Interiors magazine. The urban photographs are from a 1966 Time-Life photo book about modern American life that I found very troubling. The stern looking gentleman pictured at the bottom of the apartment block is Frank Lloyd-Wright. All the images of cakes and cookies came from an assortment of old recipe books.