A Cambridge couple’s giant gingerbread vase is the one to beat this holiday season

Résumé détaillé

They used 3D imaging, Harvard design chops, and many bags of flour to take the art of cookie making to new heights.

Depending on your taste, the high water mark for gingerbread houses may have already been set in Cambridge.

The gingerbread … object that a couple created has captivated the local art and science community and baffled gingerbread house-competition judges, all while having very little to do with the holiday spirit, strictly speaking.

“We were trying to think, What would be the craziest idea that you could make out of gingerbread?” Wyatt Roy, 37, who holds a degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and teaches at Wentworth Institute of Technology. “What kind of a process could we invent from scratch?”

His partner Julia Mattis, a 26-year-old student at the Harvard design school, grew up competing in gingerbread house-making contests, winning her first at age 9. This seemed a more sophisticated way to combine their skillsets.

“We didn’t want to make something kitsch,” said Mattis, inside the couple’s delightfully gingerbread-scented apartment this week, where Mattis also runs a home-based bakery. “We we were just like, ‘Let’s make something that we truly stand by.’”

The pair settled on a life-sized ancient Greek vase, the kind sometimes seen with paintings of mythological heroes on its sides.

Roy recorded many pieces of pottery at museums using an app on his phone called Polycam, including a terracotta vase the couple spotted at the Harvard Art Museums, which according to an online listing is more than 2,500 years old.

Building a 20-pound replica of ancient pottery was its own challenge. As far as they know, they’re the only ones to do it.

Simply pressing dough into an amphora-shaped mold and baking it wouldn’t have worked, they said, given the constraints of the material. So it had to be done in layers.

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