Maybe, just maybe, the holiday gingerbread house at French
Lick Springs Hotel will become a functional dwelling one of these years.
“Every year we joke we’re going to turn it into the bakery
clubhouse. I’m very confident this would fit a twin-sized bed. Sometimes we
work late enough (on the house) that it’s crossed my mind to bring an inflatable
mattress,” jokes Dalyn Roney, the pastry chef who oversees this mammoth
project.
It involves a couple hundred pounds of gingerbread, dozens more
pounds of icing and sugary decorations, and roughly 450 hours of work by the hotel’s
bakery staff to make this happen. Now on display on the second level of the
Event Center all throughout the 50 Days
of Lights at French Lick Resort, the gingerbread house is a dazzling sight
that you might even be able to smell from a mile away. (It is all homemade
gingerbread, after all.)
Last year our gingerbread
replica version of French Lick Springs Hotel earned the #4 distinction in
Hoosier Hotels of America’s top
25 list of gingerbread displays. And if anything can top that, it’s this
one.
One of the coolest parts about this year’s version is that
the resort’s audio/visual department got involved to kick it up a notch. This
Santa’s-workshop-themed gingerbread house is tech-savvy, with animated scenes
scrolling on one of the front and side windows. You can “see inside” the house
and watch St. Nick and the elves busy at work.
Dalyn feeds us a few more crumbs of good info about the
background and concept of this year’s gingerbread design:
“This house is
completely different from all the others, in that not only are we adding the
new technology but also bringing back some elements that we did on our early
houses that we haven’t done for a few years. The previous decorator used a lot of
candy elements so I was trying to get away from that, but this year I want to
bring the candy element out so people see it and go, ‘Oh, that’s a gingerbread
house.’”
From the colorful macarons to the stained glass windows (it
took six hours alone to make this window on the left from melted and pulled sugar),
improvisation rules much of the creative process.
“Most of the decorative
elements on here are things that we’ve never done before, like using the
macarons. We’ve done pulled sugar, but we’ve never done casted sugar in stained
glass windows before. There was a lot of learning as we go and just being like,
‘I don’t know if this is going to work, but it’d be really cool, so let’s just
try it!’ We were fortunate that enough things did work and we were able to use
them.”
And perhaps the biggest challenge of this process? Making
sure it fits through the bakery doors to be moved upstairs. At 10 feet long, 8
feet high and 4½ feet wide, this might be the biggest house the bakery team has
ever created. The gumdrops and the top of the chimney had to be temporarily
removed so there was just a few inches of clearance needed to get through the
door.
“Every year, that's the scary part,” Dalyn says with a laugh.
It’s safely moved and in place now, so stop by to see our
gingerbread wonderland — and also see if you can find a few of the hidden Easter
eggs that have also been placed on the house amid all the snowflakes, candy
canes, and all the other sugary goodness.