What started with wrist pain and a circus-themed cake turned into a job building palaces out of gingerbread.

Emily Garland, 43, from Hertfordshire and originally from Essex, now makes a living creating giant gingerbread structures, including castles and palaces from around the world.

She said she always knew she wanted a creative job, but never expected to give up her career to become what she describes as a gingerbread architect.

Garland quit her job as an administrator after being diagnosed with repetitive strain injury in her wrists and arms. She said she first started to experience pain in 2008, when her job involved a huge amount of typing and she was also working on her master’s degree in musicology in the evenings.

“The amount of months I spent typing, and stressed, was insane,” she said.

“I lost a lot of strength in my hands and arms.

“I lived with some friends and I had to ask them to change my bedsheets because I couldn’t lift a whole duvet.

“I couldn’t lift a kettle if it was full; I couldn’t hold on while on the bus.

“There wasn’t much talk about invisible disabilities. I would feel awkward taking a seat on the bus, but I also really would need one. But I looked fine.

“I struggled with that quite a lot.”

Garland said: “I am grateful that it happened, because in a way I definitely would not have had the courage to quit my job if my health was fine and I had no other reason to.”

She said she was “fairly disappointed” when her life took a corporate turn, and had “always hoped that I would have a creative job”.

“I had to earn money, I was in London.”

Her father was an architect, she said she had “always loved building things”, and she was already an avid baker who made sweet treats for friends and family.

After leaving her job, Garland said she was able to manage her wrist pain because she could stop and start when she needed to.

The business idea came by chance when she was asked to make a cake for a friend’s circus-themed birthday. She made it entirely out of gingerbread, and said it was a success.

In 2010, aged 27, she launched her gingerbread business. She said she did not start earning what she regarded as a full-time wage until 2016, and worked what she called a “bizarre set of jobs” to stay afloat.

“There was a point where I genuinely had as my job title ‘gingerbread baker, treasure hunt writer and arcade manager’.”

“Now I have nothing physically wrong with my arms. I don’t have the ongoing pain anymore,” she said.

She said each project can take 160 to 175 hours to make, and every building starts as a cardboard cut-out.

“For the large builds, I make 3D full version out of cardboard, so I don’t really do much 2D sketching, that’s not how I work. I work much better having it 3D in front of me.”

Over her career, she has created replicas of Lancaster House in London and the Palace of Versailles in Paris for the British Museum. She has also made replicas of Holkham Hall in Norfolk and the Ziggurat of Ur in Iraq.

One of her favourite commissions came from Call of Duty bosses in California, who asked her to make a replica of Nuketown and then set it on fire.

“I was asked to make and fully destroy a gingerbread building that no-one got to see or eat.”

She said the project happened over Zoom, and she sent footage that was used in the release of the Christmas game last year.

“The buildings I was making were part of Nuketown, so I had to nuke it and send more footage,” she said.

“I had to take a blowtorch to my work and fully destroy and rip it to pieces.”

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