For the love of Gingerbread 

The cookbook that started it all - the 1976 edition of the Betty Crocker Cooky Cookbook!  As a child Loreta Wilson spent hours staring at the cooky house (pg 64-65), with dreams of some day making this house.

Loreta finally built her first Gingerbread House in December 1980. The Gingerbread stuck to the pan and the frosting glue was a globby mess. After that disaster, she said she would NEVER build another Gingerbread House again!

Ten years later, Loreta built her second Gingerbread House, December 1990. Her mom had baked and constructed a couple of Gingerbread Houses and talked her and her younger sister into coming over to decorate them. Grudgingly Loreta agreed .... and the Gingerbread Architect inside her came alive.

She was hooked!

The next year windows and lights were added!  After spending a few years figuring out how to successfully build a Gingerbread House, and more importantly WHAT NOT TO DO, Loreta decided to develop this Gingerbread website and share her knowledge with the world.

In December 1999 the website went live - A site to encourage beginners and inspire the advanced. 

Every year Loreta enters a Gingerbread House in the Eugene, Oregon - Festival of Tree's fundraiser.

Loreta currently works a full-time 40 hour/week job outside the home. Building Gingerbread Houses, creating Gingerbread Patterns, and maintaining the website are hobbies with the desire to keep the world of Gingerbread alive.

Profits from Gingerbread Pattern orders and from the Gingerbread Builders Directory help maintain and keep the website, forum, yahoo e-mail group, Facebook page, and web blog free of non-gingerbread pop-up and banner advertisements.