Exploded Gingerbread Meth Lab for Citizen Brooklyn Magazine

Photo By Icarus Blake

One of my jobs working at a small digital creative agency is acting as Managing Editor of Citizen Brooklyn, an edgy, crazy, cool, visual online magazine focused on music, fashion and art.  We also have a food section but we strive to make it as untraditional as possible, having musicians sing their restaurant reviews for starters. You can check out the EAT sections to see what I mean. I honestly don’t know how we do it but we manage to squeeze out a new cover every two weeks without compromising service to our other (paying) clients. Sometimes we’re producing 5 or more photo shoots a week just to cover our clients and our magazine. Definitely a labor of love.

We all love working on CBK. It it staffed mostly by very talented young people in their 20’s and the flavor reminds me a bit of the 80’s punk rock scene in NYC. Back then the action was centered on St. Marks Place which is where we have our office. For Thanksgiving we blew up a turkey and kicked it into the East River because that’s how we roll at CBK. It’s been great to see how the magazine has grown over the last months in style, substance and readership.

Photo By Icarus Blake

So for this latest holiday issue, it was a no brainer that we had to make a gingerbread house our way and a gingerbread exploded meth lab was born.

Since I am the resident baker in the office (aren’t you all that person too?) I volunteered to make it along with one of our outside contributors, Shay Neary. 

Poor Shay. Every time she gets a phone call from me it goes something like this: “Hi Honey..how would you like to enter a dumpling eating contest for us?” or “Can you explode a turkey for us with fireworks?” (her uncle owned a fireworks store in PA) or “Will you cover a women’s roller derby tournament?”

At least we’re never boring.

Photo By Icarus Blake

It so happens that Shay has a culinary arts degree, is an amazing baker and used to participate in cake contests making creations of Cake Boss proportions. The last gingerbread house she made was 6 feet tall. I can bake a few things but she is seriously technically skilled AND way creative. So when she got that call from me – “Hi Lady, how would you like to make a gingerbread meth lab with me?”, she immediately jumped on the crazy train. We were destined to come together to make this creation. It was born out of two wine fueled late nights and lots of laughs. 

Photo By Icarus Blake

Shay gave me a recipe for sturdy gingerbread she said was great for making houses but maybe not so tasty for eating. I cut a quick pattern, rolled out the dough cut and over baked it a little to get it as stiff as possible.

The best part about making an exploded gingerbread meth lab is that if things get broken or look a bit wonky, it all looks like part of the plan.

Photo By Icarus Blake

Since no one was going to be eating this we cheated and hot glued it together, then had fun adhering candies, piping frosting and creating the explosion part. I found little candies that had a dollar bill motif on their wrappers, so we threw them everywhere. Lots of white sugar crystals were also liberally sprinkled around, Shay turned ice cream cones into trees with her expert piping and I used Color Mist to create the graffiti on the outside.

Photo By Icarus Blake

The entire thing was professionally photographed by Icarus Blake from CBK on my back deck. I conveniently live in the building next door to my office.

For the magazine text to accompany this creation, I rewrote Twas The Night Before Christmas to explain how the gingerbread meth lab caught fire. You can find that and more photos HERE on the latest issue of Citizen Brooklyn.

I’m glad I have a year to figure out how I can top this next year. Any crazy ideas out there? Anyone?