Gingerbread Has Its Strengths as a Sustainable Building Material

Among the all-natural, biodegradable building materials out there, gingerbread has one thing going for it: It’s tasty — much tastier bamboo or, I’m sure, adobe. And many attractive houses have been made from it, particularly around this time of year.

But to the critical question: How does it perform? Fortunately, two engineering students at the University of British Columbia have grappled with this problem and come up with answers.

Using gingerbread that had been shaped into building materials, including I-beams, Mercedes Duifhuis and Sean Heisler (left) wrote a 32-page paper on gingerbread’s strength in compression, bending, and tension. To find out exactly how the cookie crumbles, they suspended weights from gingerbread beams and stacked books on top of the stuff. They did not apply frosting to the gingerbread, which might have affected the strength tests.

The fats used to make the gingerbread — butter, margarine, and shortening — were variables that the engineers tested. They found that fats that led to tastier gingerbread unfortunately also led to weaker material. Butter may be the preferred fat in America’s Test Kitchen, but Ms. Duifhuis and Mr. Heisler found that it did not stand up to stresses as well as shortening.