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By Patti Verbanas

Leslie Dowling, owner of Three Tiers Cake Studio in Princeton, has never been one to settle for clich?, and she certainly rose to our challenge to design an iconoclastic holiday dessert for our readers.

Our other charge ? that it be health-conscious ? pointed her to that seasonal standard: gingerbread. ?But the gingerbread house has been done ? many, many times,? Dowling says. ?We needed a fresh approach. I scoured my books and the Internet and did not find one gingerbread design that was a birdhouse and thought, That?s perfect!?

The fact that Dowling selected a residence for our dessert design is not a coincidence: The baker is also a practicing architect, who holds a master?s degree from Princeton University and worked with the venerable Michael Graves. Always intrigued by pastry?s sculptural forms, Dowling took a leave from her studio in 2009 to enroll in the Classic Pastry Arts program at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. The move was transformative as she found a definite synergy between the two disciplines, which both demand a keen eye for proportion and detailing. ?Pastry is a form of architecture, simply using a different medium,? she explains.

Dowling, the architect, brings her clean modernist aesthetic to her cake designs, paring them down to their bare essence and celebrating the unembellished details; Dowling, the baker, sources local and organic ingredients for the healthiest recipes. ?The nature of a gingerbread house is that there is not a lot of cake and the base ingredients are not overly rich,? she says, though she concedes that there is butter, which you can?t easily get around when making pastry. ?It?s not a gingerbread house without some element of decoration. However, in lieu of all the artificial candy, I wanted to work with a more wholesome ingredient. The original German gingerbread recipes used marzipan, a ground almond and sugar paste, for the decorations. I sculpted the birds, eggs, and flowers out of marzipan and painted branches on the birdhouse with a mixture of lemon juice and edible petal dust to give it a more natural, earthy, and elegant appearance.? Dowling sourced organic marzipan at bakingsuppliesstore.com and the organic and fresh-ground spices from the Whole Earth Center in Princeton and Whole Foods. She used organic dark chocolate for its heart-health properties and was inspired to incorporate coffee, another health powerhouse, into her recipe by Jennifer Linder McGlinn, author of Gingerbread (Chronicle Books, 2009).

When preparing this recipe, Dowling recommends setting aside enough time, even splitting up the process into two days, to give you time to concentrate and create without being rushed. ?Making the dough and allowing it to thoroughly chill is important,? she says. ?You want to be able to roll it out as thinly and evenly as possible, Once the baked gingerbread has cooled, it needs to be very even and hard so that it will stand up and the edges will line up with nice, clean seams.? She also advises having all the ingredients on hand before you start. ?One of the most basic, yet important, things they told us at the French Culinary Institute was mise en place, mise en place, mise en place, which refers to reviewing your recipe fully and then gathering your ingredients, instruments, and tools and having them measured out, prepared, and sitting in front of you before you begin to cook. Running around collecting things as you're cooking is a recipe for mistakes, and it's inefficient.?

Most importantly, Dowling says, have fun with this design and make it your own. ?Given the same basic kit of parts,? she says, ?no two Gingerbread Houses are alike.?


To see pictures and get recipes and templates for the house, visit www.njlhealthandbeauty.com/dining/home-tweet-home/