Edible art and construction medium: gingerbread is addictive to work with. Once you start seriously building gingerbread structures you develop an eye that assesses everything through the lense of “could I do that in gingerbread?” Whether it’s a travel show on cable featuring European castles or a woodworking project a friend posts on social media, the serious gingerbread artists will want to challenge themselves to build it with cookies (and other edible objects).
My Bucket List
2022 National Gingerbread House Competition – Top 10 finalist
2021 National Gingerbread House Competition – Top 10 finalist
2020 Savannah Gingerbread Trail
My Journey
I started doing gingerbread houses with my kids when they were little. I wanted to make it our Christmas tradition so that when they were grown and off on their own I would have the memories and so would they. The first one was a gingerbread barn that was inspired by their Fisher Price Barnyard Play Set. It wasn’t fancy but it was cute and it stayed standing through the holidays, and since it incorporated their toys they got a big kick out of it.
Every year after that I made a gingerbread house using a different theme. One year the theme was “The Three Little Pigs”, complete with 3 structures based on the story. The straw house was covered in broken up shredded wheat cereal. The house of sticks was made using large pretzel sticks to build a log cabin. The brick house was a more traditional gingerbread structure. My youngest decided to live out the story by taking his Buzz Lightyear action doll and whacking the straw and stick house into piles of rubble. I stopped him before he got to the brick house but it was a close thing. My mom sent me a wolfy-looking Santa figure to complete the tableau and we soldiered on through the holidays.
Since then we have had a bargain that if they don’t touch the gingerbread house during the holiday season I will let them destroy it on Christmas morning. That’s the kind of bargain that works with little boys. Over the years their destructive techniques have evolved along with their toys and talents. They have run over them with their Big Wheels and their toboggans, smashed them with baseball bats, blown them up, and dropped them out of second story windows. It’s an arrangement that works for everyone – I have the fond memories of making and displaying a gingerbread house for Christmas and they have the memories of destroying it after opening their gifts.
I have kept up the tradition even after the kids have grown up and moved out of the house which, combined with the luxury of having the space (and an extremely supportive husband), has given me the opportunity to take over the dining room table and do bigger and more complex projects as well as giving me the time to make structures for the office Christmas parties.
The more you do, the more you want to do when it comes to taking on challenging gingerbread structures and you are constantly inspired by the world around you. Like doll houses, for instance. My mom wanted to build a Victorian doll house at one point and talked about it a lot. Years later I happened to see one and decided that would be my gingerbread house that year. As I worked on it a neighbor mentioned a local competition and display – nothing big, but it was a fun way to share the results with more than just my family and coworkers so I decided to enter it. I didn’t win but I didn’t embarrass myself, which is, in itself, always a win when working with gingerbread structures. Yes, that’s a “leg lamp” in the front window.
That was the start of what has become an annual tradition for me, and one son enrolling in The Citadel (South Carolina Military College) was the opening for me to participate in the National Gingerbread House Competition held each year at the Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC. We lived in Massachusetts at the time and it was an 800+ mile trip to transport gingerbread to compete, which is a daunting task. Have you ever hauled a gingerbread structure? If so, you know how scary it is to move it even 20 miles from home to work. Now multiply that by 40 and you get a sense of the level of stress involved to move it across multiple states, through mountains, and leave it in the back of your vehicle overnight at the hotel halfway there.
Year one competing on a national level was a big step outside my comfort zone. Up until that time I had done traditional structures, but competing at a national competition called for taking it up a notch and taking on something nontraditional and really challenging. I chose to do a Fairy Mushroom House. The only flat piece of gingerbread was the base of the roof – everything else was curved. Again, I didn’t win but it was definitely popular because I had friends from the region sending me links to local television news shows doing features on the display that included my house.
That was in 2015. The next two years we were relocating to South Carolina (where the winters don’t last 6 months) and renovating our dream home, so I was unable to dedicate the 300+ hours needed to build something really spectacular. By 2018 we were stable enough in the new home to allow me to compete again, and once again I took on a challenge with curves.
My husband loves masted sailing ships and has a small collection of model ones. In 2016 I found a museum quality replica of the USS Constitution and gave it to him for Christmas. We were married at the Charleston Marine Barracks in Boston and had wedding pictures taken on the USS Constitution which has its birth next door, so the gift had very special meaning to both of us. It became my inspiration due in part to it being the perfect size to fit within the limits of the competition – and it would be a challenge to engineer a hollow curved hull that would support the weight of the structure and all the decorations. It took a whole month to finally get a hull that worked! The rules say it has to be 100% edible and 70% gingerbread so my options were limited but I figured out how to do it. As before, I didn’t win but it was again a popular entry that was included on not just local coverage but also was included multiple times in The Food Network’s coverage of the event.
And then came 2019. A new job had me maxed out but I still wanted to compete so picked something without curves but with a ton of detail. My husband bought an inexpensive laser etcher for me to use so I was able to take it up another notch in terms of realistic features and details. Alas, I ran out of time while finishing the exterior so I knew going in I would not win but the judge’s feedback was very positive so I am primed for this year and ready to go. Now all we need is for the event to actually happen and that’s not a given at his point.
If you think Gingerbread is hard to do I highly encourage you the give it a try and laugh at yourself when you get that inevitable “nailed it” moment. You learn from every mistake and you will make fewer than you think you will. And if all else fails, add dinosaur and own it like a boss.
