South Builds Unique Gingerbread House
For many of us, building a gingerbread house is a family tradition that spans generations. Typically, these houses include gum drops, frosting and other essentials that are provided in the pre-made kit from your local grocery store or your grandmother's house.
Pastry Arts students at South Seattle College have their own gingerbread house tradition that continued this fall, and they took it to another level that we have come to expect from our acclaimed culinary program. Under the direction of Instructor Chef Chris Harris, students have logged over 100 hours constructing a gingerbread house for the record books.
"Every year, we try to make it a little more challenging and detailed," Chef Harris explained. "Our students are up to the challenge and so why not raise the bar?"
Standing at about three-feet tall, this year's design was modeled after a California mansion called the "Carson Mansion," complemented with its impeccable grounds. The original Carson Mansion was constructed in the Victorian style with an incredible amount of detail that Chef Harris noted translates very well to a gingerbread house.
In total, the house is constructed of about 20 pounds of gingerbread dough and 10-15 pounds of royal icing, with well over a thousand hand-piped leaves that mimic the immaculate grounds of the mansion. No detail was too small for this project; right down to the rice-crispy treat rock bed to the windows made of gelatin and the decorative roof tiles; every detail was covered.
"I've made the standard gingerbread house with the gumdrops and the icing," student Melissa Wagner explained. "But this is so much more detailed than what I'm used to. I just really feel privileged and honored to work with the chefs on this."
South's Pastry Arts Department was commissioned by the corporate offices of the Ritz-Carlton to create this one-of-a-kind gingerbread house. It will be presented as a gift to Costco's corporate offices where it will be raffled off at their annual holiday party. Of all of the Ritz-Carlton's partners across the country, South is the only school that is commissioned to create a gingerbread house.
This unique opportunity was one that student Holly Odegard was not going to pass on.
"This is a fantastic opportunity for us to get to work with things we wouldn't normally," she explained. "You get a lot of experience getting to do things on a very tight schedule and you get to learn things on the fly. It helps you look at everything in the big picture with a different perspective and see the potential for using all kinds of things in ways it wouldn't normally get used."
While some of the work on this project was done in class, the majority of the work was done on the students' own time after class and on weekends.
"We have had a lot of really enthusiastic students who have pitched in on top of their work and school schedules, "Harris explained.
With this year's project completed, the only question that remains is what will they do next year?
"I'm not sure," Chef Harris said with a smile. "We will probably go back to a seaside village or maybe a castle?"
The tradition continues.