Bluffton baker builds award-winning gingerbread cash register. See what she made
One might call Kelly Clements a gingerbread engineer. A cookie architect. A confectionary builder.
For the 20-year Bluffton resident, the world is a catalog of potential gingerbread builds — from buildings to jukeboxes to the forgotten mechanics of an old cash register. ‘Could this somehow be built out of spice, sugar and flour?’ she thinks as she roams shops and streets.
Clements opened the door of her Sun City home dressed in a festive gingerbread vest, matching pin and tiny gingerbread earrings.
Inside, gingerbread memorabilia was everywhere: a red Gingerbread Street sign, shadow boxes holding former winning bakes, a wreath urging visitors to bake with love, and fresh-baked, iced cookies spread across the kitchen table.
Across a hallway from the kitchen, drawers upon drawers are filled with different cookie tools Clements has collected over time. A red scrapbook captures memories and photos from her former competitions, like when she built cookie-fied versions of the Lucas Theater in Savannah and Santa’s castle (which she later turned into a Swiss chalet).
On a dining room table covered by a red and green plaid tablecloth sits the 2025 South Carolina prize winner. It's a nearly lifesize rendition of a vintage cash register, and sits on a stand with needles, thread, buttons and sewing patterns. It is all undetectably crafted with gingerbread, fondant and other sweets.
The register took nearly 200 hours to bake and build, including during afternoons after her administrative office job at Moss Creek and on weekends since October.
She has since joined a small but mighty subculture of “cookiers” that specialize in crafting gingerbread creations. Competitions have popped up across the country, notably the national competition that takes place in the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. She started competing in 2010 and has won a myriad of prizes for her cookie creations — from a painting and easel to a 2-D Broadway sign — but she had not taken first place until this year.
How she builds her gingerbread structures
The process for all of Clements’ 3-D builds starts the same: by figuring out the dimensions of the structure and making sketches. Her next step is crafting the piece out of foam core boards first to see how the pieces will fit together. She uses the model pieces to then cut and bake the gingerbread pieces.
Unlike typical gingerbread you eat, she says, structural gingerbread lacks the fat, which makes it bake and cool into nearly rock solid pieces. Sometimes, the baking takes some thinking outside the box, she said. She baked one of the rounded pieces on an air conditioning vent because she couldn’t find a suitable pan.
And like a true gingerbread engineer, Clements pulls out a toolbox to finish the rest. A sander, file, buzz saw, Dremel and even vices take up space on her kitchen table as she perfects each piece and brings them together. She says she is grateful she took shop instead of taking “home ec” in junior high.
Finishing the award-winning cash register
The craft takes a notable amount of precision, and often times a great deal of patience.
“I have more patience for this than I have for people,” CIements said. “I get lost in this. I could do this eight, ten hours a day. It’s relaxing for me.” She admits that cookies (and basset hounds) are her two addictions.
But even still, finishing the cash register project was a great relief for Clements.
“I was thrilled that I got it done,” she said. “I walked around it for two days like ‘I actually got it done! I did it!’”
The moments she finished the cash register and won the competition carried even deeper meaning: it was the first project Clements completed after her mother died earlier this year. She described her mom as a “Betty Crocker” who made the best flourless chocolate tort, was with her the day Clements first found inspiration in a vintage cash register at a North Carolina store.
After years of trial, error and celebration, Clements says the joys of gingerbread come as much from the process as the finished piece.
“Don’t get discouraged,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many pieces I’ve burnt, I’ve broken. You sometimes just have to think out of the box and just have fun with it. And what you don’t like, you get to eat.”
