Suitor from IUP says it with gingerbread

There's a sort of romance about gingerbread houses.

Perhaps it's the holiday memories of childhood displays, parties or baking at home. Then there's the delicious smell, aromatic with the exotic spices of ginger, cloves and nutmeg. The final fillip is the history of gingerbread, which medieval ladies presented in cake form to their favorite knights.

So it was that when Ken Midgett, 22, of Sellersville, Bucks County, a student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, wanted to propose to his girlfriend, Katie Shortuse, 22, a teacher from Ephrata, Lancaster County, he decided to use a gingerbread house.

The two met as education students at IUP and visit each other every weekend. They travel to Pittsburgh for special occasions. Last year, they took a trip to Pittsburgh around the holidays and visited PPG Place, where they skated and saw the annual gingerbread house display.

"I ranted and raved how much I liked it," Shortuse says. "I liked skating outside, and I remembered making gingerbread houses when I was little."

Shortuse has an additional reason for appreciating gingerbread houses: She is a family and consumer sciences teacher.

When Midgette returned to Pittsburgh for a conference last month, he saw this year's display and the idea of gingerbread-house-as-proposal idea was born. He planned to bake the house himself, ask permission from PPG Place officials to stash it among this year's display and wait with ring in hand.

"I typed in 'how to make a gingerbread house' on the Internet and a video came up on YouTube with instructions," Midgett says. He bought the equipment and ingredients, and then did exactly what the YouTube woman said. For good measure, Midgett drafted a friend with culinary experience to help him in his Indiana apartment kitchen.

"Making the dough was actually painless," he says. "Putting it together was the most difficult." He ended up using not only icing, but the most powerful glue he could find to hold the house together.

"It was very tall and very narrow. The roof had to be big because I had to write on it," which he did himself, inscribing, "Katie ... Will you marry me?" in large script.

The journey to Pittsburgh to give the house to PPG marketing staffers Anita Falce and Carla Roehner was a little hairy. Midgett did not want the house to be shift in the moving car, so he kept a hand on the house the whole way in.

On Dec. 6, he and Shortuse made a trip to Pittsburgh, ostensibly for skating in PPG Plaza, dinner and to see Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre's production of "The Nutcracker."

The two strolled PPG Wintergarden and stopped to look at the gingerbread houses. Then they got to Midgett's.

"I didn't think it was for me," Shortuse says, because "Katie" is a common first name.

She turned to Midgett, who was by that time on his knees, ring in hand.

Of course, she said yes. Such is the romance of gingerbread.

Love, as they say, is sweet.