Home Sweet $77,910 Gingerbread Home
Sure, you could build your own gingerbread house this holiday season – laboring over the icing and gumdrop placement to get them just so. But if you happen to have $77,910 rattling around in your pocket, have an affinity for ginger and gems, and take deep pride in your home, luxury-launches website VeryFirstTo.com has a better idea: The Most Precious Christmas Gingerbread House Ever.
The U.K.-based site has teamed up with Le Cordon Bleu-trained, high-end cake baker Georgia Green, of Georgia’s Cakes, to offer what it says is the “world’s most expensive gingerbread house” – made in the precise image of your own home. The house features “150 AAAA grade South Sea Pearls and a 5 carat unheated Mozambique Ruby,” the company notes, all set lovingly (and one hopes somewhat securely) within curlicues of icing. (You can order your house with extra pearls for an additional fee.) After you devour the bespoke cake, these treasures remain with you as a keepsake.
And you will want to devour the house, which will measure around 65 cm by 35 cm by 45 cm, if the list of fancy ingredients is any indication of flavor. They include Bacheldre Mill Flour, Suma Raw Cane Sugar, Echire Butter, Meridian Blackstrap Molasses, Crazy Jack Golden Syrup, Ceylon Cinnamon, Steenbergs Ginger, Suma Icing Sugar and Duchy Eggs.
Those who may feel pangs of guilt over such an extravagant expenditure may find them somewhat assuaged by the fact that £1,000 ($1,571) for every house purchased will be donated to the charity The Prince’s Trust, which helps young people in the U.K.
Note: Delivery fees are not included in the price – and international orders are subject to the purchaser's country’s food-import regulations. But if you have $77,910 to splash out on a bespoke, bejeweled gingerbread house, you can probably also afford an assistant who can work those details out for you.