In hindsight, I should have known that something so lovely could never be easy to make from scratch. At the very least, you'd think this normally skeptical reporter would have realized it's impossible for a hexagonal box crafted of gingerbread to hold together without any visible means of support. Where was the icing?

I was daydreaming about holiday cookies and candies -- spurred on, no doubt, by the glossy holiday cookbooks piling up on my desk. I was wooed in particular by "Christmas Sweets" by Georgeanne Brennan (Chronicle, $18.95), mostly because of the old-fashioned candy-cane cookies pictured on its cover, which I have fond memories of making with my mom.

Never underestimate the power of nostalgia.

Any one of the book's 65 recipes would have been fun to try making with my kids. But only one jumped out at me: That six-sided gingerbread box, with its exquisite powdered-sugar stencils and shiny silver dragees.

What a pretty alternative to the tinfoil pie pans I use to deliver gifts of Christmas cookies!

I should have simply drooled over the picture for a moment and then moved on. (Remember -- it had all those icing-free seams.) Instead, I made a shopping list.

Gazillions of little kids craft gingerbread houses out of frosting and graham crackers during the holiday season; just take a walk through PPG Place's Wintergarden, Downtown, where the 5th annual gingerbread house display and competition is under way, and you'll see more than 300 of them.

So really, how hard could it be?

Um, pretty dang hard, I'm ashamed to admit.

It proved so challenging that if a professional pastry chef didn't happen to live around the corner, I'd still be trying to get the pieces to stand up straight.

The project got off to an easy start. Cutting out the cardboard templates for the top, bottom and sides of the box was a breeze; so was rolling out the gingerbread dough into a nice, thin sheet. From there, though, it quickly turned sticky. Literally.

You have to place the templates on top of the dough and press down to trace the shape with a knife without slipping. But you can't press too hard, or the cardboard will stick. You also have to be careful not to stretch the cutouts when you transfer them to a baking sheet, or they'll bake into slightly different sizes. I did both, several times. (Hint: flour the templates before you place them on the dough, and roll the dough on waxed paper so you can flip it upside down right onto the baking sheet.)

The next challenge was trying to stencil a design on the sides with powdered sugar. Even though I carefully followed the directions (stencil on top of a box side, brush with corn syrup, let dry for 10 minutes) the sugar either settled in clumps or crept under the edges, resulting in an ugly, sticky mess.

I finally gave up and decided to decorate the sides with icing.

Then it really got ugly.

The tip on my pastry bag was either too big or I was too impatient; most likely it was a combination of the two. Rather than a thin, neat line, the royal icing, made from a packaged mix, came out in clumps.

Clumps, I might add, that didn't stick anything together. Time after time, the gingerbread pieces collapsed in a heap.

I didn't cry, but I sure felt like it.

In desperation, I called my friend Kim, whose Brownie troop the week before had created a gingerbread house for the Wintergarden display.

"How do you get it to stay together?" I moaned.

"Well, we didn't actually use hot glue, but I have to say it wouldn't hurt," she quipped.

I might have given up if I hadn't remembered that Alice Leich, executive pastry chef for Parkhurst Dining Services, lived around the corner. If I baked all the pieces again, maybe she could show me the right way to assemble them? Bless her culinary heart, she could and would.

Surveying my mess of a box the next afternoon, Alice couldn't help but smile. But when I showed her the glossy image in the cookbook, her brows knitted into a frown.

"I don't know how they did it without any icing showing," she mused. "Maybe with a caramel of melted sugar?"

"Or trick photography," I ventured under my breath.

Armed with a box of pastry tips, enough pieces for two gingerbread boxes and a container of homemade royal icing, Alice quickly got to work. Piping a thin line of icing around the edge of one side, she positioned it on a box bottom, held it in place for a few moments and -- when she was sure it was secure -- propped it up with an empty glass. And darned if it didn't stay put. My daughters cheered.

The problem with my icing, she explained, was its texture. Royal icing should be thick and tacky -- thicker even than Elmer's glue.

I also slathered on way too much of the stuff, when a better technique is to draw a line of icing on the edges and then reinforce it by piping more icing on the inside edges and corners, "as if you're welding," she said.

But my biggest mistake -- aside from failing to practice my technique with the pastry bag beforehand on a piece of waxed paper -- was simply working too quickly.

"It takes patience and practice," Alice told me.

She was right. Carefully gluing the six sides together and decorating the edges with colored icing took my neighbor well over an hour. My failed effort? About 15 minutes.

The moral of the story: If you're gifted this year with a gingerbread cookie box, know that the person who put it together has patience, dedication and more than a bit of talent.

Or maybe they just live close to a pastry chef.