Sweet and delicious homes for the holidays

"If you mess up," says professional gingerbread house decorator Jacqui Niosi, "cover it with candy!"

Using a frosting bag to paint holly leaves on a gingerbread house, she confides: "If I messed up this roof, I would cover it with white frosting and make it 'snow.' The important thing is, don't get frustrated. And have fun!"

Ms. Niosi is the manager of Ginger Betty's Bakery, a neighborhood business not far from Boston Harbor in Quincy, Mass. Outside the store, a cold wind swoops off the ocean. But inside, everything is warm and sugary. Shelves bulge with fat, purple-sugar-coated cookies, jars of brightly colored gumballs and gumdrops, and gingerbread in every shape and size: turkeys, Pilgrims, the Red Sox, baby footprints, and more. And on shelf after shelf, rack after rack, sit the houses Betty's is known for - golden brown gingerbread houses dripping white frosting icicles.

"Lots of bakeries don't do houses," says Niosi, who estimates she decorates "thousands" each holiday season, "but I'm so used to it, it seems easy to me."

As a child, Niosi remembers baking with her Italian grandmother. They both stayed up until 3 a.m. Easter morning making pizzelles, a traditional holiday cookie. Niosi glances over at her colleagues in the kitchen busily rolling gingerbread dough, decorating cupcakes, and cutting shapes. "This all reminds me of her," she says.

After high school, Niosi went to work at Ginger Betty's. Owner Beth Veneto Jeannetti - the "Betty" of Ginger Betty's - took the teenager under her wing. "I'd make cakes at home," remembers Niosi, "and when I brought in pictures, Beth taught me better techniques."

Ms. Jeannetti is clearly delighted with the colorful confections that pack her store: "I mean, gingerbread and gumdrops. How cool is this?" She had always wanted to own a business. She made her first house for a caterer friend who needed a three-story gingerbread brownstone to decorate a law firm's Christmas party. "I had the whole dining room table tied up with Necco wafers, frosting, and gumdrops," she recalls. "I was saying to myself, 'I'm never going to do one of these again.' "

But the law firm loved her gingerbread brownstone so much they asked her to do a second. One house led to another, and she opened Ginger Betty's in 1995. "People would ask, 'What else can you do? You can't just do gingerbread.' But I had this vision. And now you see it everywhere, in all the magazines."

"I think it might be 'Gingy' from 'Shrek' who's made it so popular," muses Niosi. (For anyone who doesn't know, Gingy is a gingerbread-man character in the animated film. He's back for "Shrek 2" as well.)

The biggest house Ginger Betty's has built was a four-foot-tall Harry Potter castle. The most exotic, perhaps, was an Italian cityscape in gingerbread set on a canal of frosting.

Then there are the eccentric requests. One wedding couple wanted themselves done up as cookies for their wedding reception. "They got a [gingerbread] bride and groom ... and when they left their seats at the reception they put their gingerbread cookies there instead," Niosi recalls with a smile.

She puts the finishing touches on a house, writing "Merry Christmas" in perfect white-icing cursive.

"I'm not artistic with pencil and paper," she says, "but I can do it with frosting. Painting? Forget it. Frosting, no problem."

Clutching each other's hands and dropping breadcrumbs behind them to mark their path, Hansel and Gretel wander deep into the woods. But the crumbs are eaten by birds and the woods grow dark and menacing. Then suddenly, as if by magic, there it is: A house made of cake, with clear-sugar windows and gingerbread trim!

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