It’s official – The Gingerbread City has come to New York.

 

Residents of FiDi are already in-the-know and can reportedly smell the cookie houses throughout their neighborhood. A miniature city of futuristic houses entirely constructed of gingerbread and candy is on display at the Seaport – with gingerbread baked courtesy of Balthazar. These professionally-built cityscapes are easily mistaken for pricey works of art. Premier architectural minds used their applied their training to produce a verifiable wonderland of delicious fun.

Those wandering the candy-cane lanes at The Gingerbread City in NYC may wonder where all of this gingerbread madness started – and when the qualifications for a “good” gingerbread house maker suddenly amounted to the same as those required of a minor Renaissance master.

Gingerbread houses are not a new phenomenon, but the artistry behind them is a modern cultural trend. The earliest villages of cookie-built houses originated in Germany, inspired by fairytales.

History of Gingerbread Houses

Remember the story of Hansel and Gretel? Apart from being a harrowing tale told to young children (teaching kids to – above all – never leave crumbs on the floor), the story is supposedly responsible for candy-constructed houses. The original 1880s fairytale reads: “When they [Hansel and Gretel] came nearer, they saw that the house was built of bread, and roofed with cakes, and the window was of transparent sugar.” Alternate translations referred to the “bread” as “gingerbread.” This was great news for German bakers, who were already well-versed in the art of lebkuchen, or “spiced-honey biscuit”-making. They took the Grimms’ cue and ran with it, creating delectable confections of miniature houses with cookie walls, held together by frosting.

 

Centuries later, bakers around the world still construct houses that look (and usually are) good enough to eat. However, in modern times, yearly competitions have raised the stakes. Take, for example, the Annual National Gingerbread House Contest at Asheville, NC’s Grove Park Inn. That nation-wide conference culminates in a display of hundreds of incredibly detailed and awe-inspiring works of culinary magic. Each house is more than a cobble of cookies and candy – it is a work of art.

Modern Bakers Take the Cake

To come out on top at the Grove Park Inn, contestants must go beyond the traditional gingerbread house. Instead, winners in each category shine with their originality and ingenuity. This past year, judges mulled over 200 entries from twenty-two states and Guatemala to choose the winners. Adult, teens, youth and children battled in out in the sweetest battle outside of Cupcake Wars. Winners walked away with more than just bragging rights. At the end of the day, over $40,000 in cash and prizes was up for grabs.

 

Entrants were scored on metrics appropriate to the task at hand. These includes “Best Use of Color,” “Best Use of Sprinkles,” “Most Unique Ingredient,” “Pop Culture Star,” “Most Innovative Structure,” and “Longest Standing Competitor.” Each gingerbread house was required to be constructed of 5% gingerbread and be 100% edible – no small feat, considering the vast majority of these houses looked like they came out of an artist’s studio, not a kitchen.

Skeptical? Just consider this year’s grand-prize winner – a mini Indonesian-inspired dwelling entitled “Christmas at the Tonkonan” built by an aunt-and-niece duo. The breathtaking piece includes a lattice room, palm fronds, detailed “woodwork”, and tiny home-dwellers – ready to celebrate the holiday of their little lifetimes.

The houses at the Grove Park – while unbelievably beautiful – do stray from the traditional gingerbread house form. Those looking for a more traditional (yet still impressive) way to whet their gingerbread house appetite this year can look no further than the life-size gingerbread house at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

 

Life-Size Gingerbread House

It’s true – not only is the Fairmont the former haunt of famed San Franciscan artist Leroy Neiman (who was known to doodle on menus while waiting to be served at tea), it is also the West Coast’s Christmas Central.

Dubbed “Festive Holidays at the Fairmont,” guests can enjoy all sorts of holiday hoopla. However, the real stunner is the life-size gingerbread house in the lobby. Constructed of hundreds of bricks made by staff pastry chefs, this house is the one all the gingerbread men on the block are clamoring to move into. (You thought the New York housing market was rough? Try finding real estate fit for life as a cookie.)

At the Fairmont, the gingerbread house is not for sale – and no prizes are awarded – but lucky guests may score the chance to tour the inside of the house. Jury’s out as to whether anyone has actually been brave enough to take a bite out of the walls while on the private tour, but hotel staff claims that they have seen guests pawing at the pounds of See’s Candies adorning the windowsills.

Gingerbread Decorating Is The New Culinary Art

Whether big or small, the culinary confections bakers are turning out this time of year deserve our appreciation and recognition. The time, talent, and craft that is required to decorate houses of this detail and magnitude is nothing short of artistic genius. In fact, according to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), art courses are now a required component of educational programs for master pastry chefs. The class is called “Principles of Design” and the syllabus reads like it’s straight out of Parsons – students learn how to shade, combine colors, plan, sketch and create art across multiple media.

Other modern artists and designers have taken this as a cue to apply their skills (honed in traditional artistic settings) to the art of pastry decorating, including gingerbread house making.  Last year, designer Kelly Wearstler and Richard Christiansen (owner of the luxe Flamingo Estate) collaborated with Balthazar’s pastry chef, Mark Tasker, to create a limited-edition gingerbread house offering. Only 100 houses were produced, and proceeds from the (substantial) sales price went to Structure, a charitable initiative that helps communities rebuild sustainable houses after natural disasters.

The unique house – done in Kelly Wearstler’s signature California Modernist style – looked like it belonged in California in the 1940s. The innovative design featured a checked exterior and clean, architectural lines. In short, it was iconic and bold, and lived up to the hype of her stated intention prior to starting the project, which was to “build a type of gingerbread house [she and Christiansen] would actually like to live in.”

Wearstler’s design, combined with Tasker’s skill as a baker, fueled holiday magic in the most delicious of forms. The pair created art fit for auction at Sotheby’s, or for display in any art museum in New York or L.A.. Wearstler found the process so intriguing and inspiring from a design perspective that she applauded the gingerbread base as being “the ideal canvas” for her vision to take shape.

At this time of year, and especially in the face of the modern political, economical, and environmental crises impacting our communities, there is something so valuable about the act of taking time to experience art in all its festive forms. For gingerbread house artists, the entire process is akin to artistic masters hard at work in-studio. Here’s to the gingerbread house bakers – the amateur and the masters – who bring us all to stop and wonder at their art of baking.

Want to try your own hand at baking a gingerbread house? Click here for King Arthur Baking’s “construction gingerbread” recipe. 

Rather buy your own, already-crafted work of edible art? Look no further than Solvang Bakery‘s creations.