Details Give Life to Gingerbread Creations

Posted in Exhibitions, Holiday Train Show on January 6 2009, by Plant Talk

Gingerbread Adventures in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden includes a display of detailed and fragrant gingerbread creations by renowned pastry chefs in and around New York. Here Leslie Randazzo, co-owner with her husband, Mark Randazzo, of Mark Joseph Cakes, describes how they conceptualized and executed their design.

Although Mark and I had never worked with gingerbread before, we were so enthusiastic about making our gingerbread debut in The New York Botanical Garden’s annual holiday exhibit. Yes, Mark is a pastry chef, but he specializes in custom cakes, so this was quite different.

This year’s theme, “Gingerbread People at Work and at Play,” left us wondering “What do gingerbread people do?” I called my nephew, Harry, whose immediate response was, “the same things we do.” Aha! Brilliant! With our target audience being kids, we thought about careers revered by children. It was my sister who suggested firemen. Then we were on a roll. Mark and I share a love for New York City’s pre-war architecture, so there was no question that we’d model our main structure after an old FDNY house. Through research, Mark found one in Manhattan on Lafayette Street that is stunning.

Our next order of business was a crash course in gingerbread structures, namely, keeping them up. For this, Mark made an icing that was similar in consistency to cement. We cut the gingerbread dough into the dimensions that were already carefully calculated. These large pieces make up the main structure. Then we cut gingerbread dough into equally sized rectangles. These were used as a second layer, to achieve the stones the building is made of. Laying the “stones” was extremely time consuming, because the firehouse had so many dimensions and different shapes to work around and each “stone” had to be trimmed to fit precisely in the appropriate space. The windows were made using a sculptor’s molding material that we melted and poured into the gingerbread’s square openings. As it dried, it solidified beautifully. To light the inside, we used LED Christmas lights that we clipped short. For the roof, we thought the perfect candy would be bite-sized black licorice that we would line up to look like shingles. Unfortunately, after placing on more than half of the licorice we discovered that the oily coating used to keep the pieces from sticking together in the package were also keeping them from sticking to the icing. The solution was Nilla® wafers. We were concerned that they wouldn’t cut easily with a knife, but they worked quite well.

Once the main structure was completed, we began adding the details. Red Twizzlers® were used for each window frame, and icing was piped on to create the appearance of snow. The fire truck was decorated using a sugar dough called “gum paste.” Then we designed the wintry fun that one notices when examining the display closely such as the snowball fight and the boy making a snow angel as the firemen look on.

This entire experience was so rewarding; it felt like a tremendous accomplishment after a total of 70 hours of labor. It was great fun and well worth the effort.