Gingerbread Houses

Lloyd Dobyns: Hi. Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg: Past & Present on history.org. This is “Behind the Scenes” where you meet the people who work here. That’s my job. I’m Lloyd Dobyns, and mostly I ask questions. Executive pastry Chef Joe Sciegaj starts thinking about Christmas long before anyone else. It's his job to oversee the planning and construction of elaborately detailed gingerbread houses that decorate Colonial Williamsburg. Joe is with us on the program.

Lloyd: So, is yours done more for the decoration than the taste, or more for the taste than the decoration?

Joe: More for the decoration. We've done many different types of villages in the past – some being colonial villages, New England villages. It all depends on what strikes our fancy this year is what we're going to create.

Lloyd: Ok, what struck your fancy this year?

Joe: Well, the fancy this year is, we're going to probably do a combination. We're going to do some colonial buildings, one of the villages. Then we're just going to do what we would like our employees to think of as their ideas. Right now we have externs from culinary schools, and they're creating some buildings right now as we speak. Their time here is limited, they're only here for a couple of months. They'll be leaving soon, so we’re having them do their houses right now, so we can critique it and send a report back to their school.

Lloyd: How many people work on this project?

Joe: We'll have about six people working on the project. Each person will do between two and three houses.

Lloyd: How long does this take?

Joe: Well, the baking part's easy. Making the dough, you know, within a half hour you have your dough made. What we normally do is roll it out, then freeze the dough. Then we take it out and cut it. It gives it a nice true cut, nice and straight. Then baking takes 15-20 minutes. Putting the house together, on the other hand, takes days.

What they normally do is, bring an idea to us – looking in a magazine, looking in a cookbook, they'll find a building that they like, and they'll like to do, and we look at it and say yeah, it's feasible, go ahead and do it. Normally it doesn't always come out like a picture looks. Pictures in magazines, they'll make 30 or 40 houses to get the one perfect one. We'll let them go ahead and do what they want to do to make it their own house.

Lloyd: Are all the materials edible?

Joe: Yes.

Lloyd: So, once you get this house assembled, theoretically, you could break a hunk off and eat it?

Joe: You wouldn't want to, but you can. Like I said, we've started months ago on making the pieces. They'll be put together within the next two weeks. Icing is icing, it's going to become hard as a rock. Royal icing becomes very hard. It's edible, but you know, we suggest you don't eat it.

Lloyd: What are some of the materials that you suggest they don't eat, even if they wanted to?

Joe: When we make a house, of course it's made out of gingerbread and it's made out of icing. But each roof could be different. We usually do shredded wheat on one. Well, shredded wheat sprinkled on a roof in August is really not going to be very edible come November and December.

We do candies, we do Necco wafers for roofs. We do twizzlers for roofs. But these things will all be sitting out, and after a few weeks you really wouldn't want to eat them.

Lloyd: You've got this gingerbread house, it's been cut out, it's been assembled – well, baked, then assembled and decorated. Do they ever break?

Joe: Yes. We have to probably once a week go to the restaurants and the hotels to check on them. Depending on where they put them, if they put them in a window, the sun from coming through the window is going to melt some of the sugar on the houses, could melt the roof off the houses. Roofs are a big problem. All the shingles will fall off. So we're usually once a week going back to make repairs.

Lloyd: How do you repair a gingerbread house?

Joe: The shredded wheat roof will now become just royal icing. It's going to have a different look to it. You're not going to be able to repair it with the same materials that were on it. You just really can't.

Lloyd: How do you repair a cracked wall?

Joe: Icing. Icing is the easiest way.

Lloyd: You just slap some on, and the crack disappears.

Joe: Yes. Then we put a lot of powdered sugar on so it looks like snow. Snow covers everything.

Lloyd: Are any of the houses historically accurate? That you say, this house is Peyton Randolph's house?

Joe: We have made a couple houses as accurate as we could. I mean, you can't have every shingle, you can't have every shutter to look exactly the same. But we try to make it to look like it is right now on the Duke of Gloucester Street.

Lloyd: I was interested if you had gingerbread people, but then I read in an article that the people in the gingerbread houses are made of marzipan.

Joe: Yes. Most of the people are made out of marzipan, only because you can color it, you can make many different figures. We do gingerbread figures, we do horses and some animals and stuff, but mostly the people are made out of marzipan.

Lloyd: Have you gone through different recipes to find different houses?

Joe: We went through three or four recipes, and we settled on one that, when it bakes and it's sitting for months, it doesn't warp. They stay pretty flat and the houses stay pretty firm when we put them together. But we went through many recipes. The gingerbread that we make for the Raleigh Tavern's gingerbread cookies is not quite what we do for the gingerbread houses. It's a different recipe.

Lloyd: If you make a house like you make a cookie, it won't last long.

Joe: Well, there's things that you do with a gingerbread house. A cookie is baked for maybe 12 minutes, where we bake a house for 20 minutes. Baking it dries it out more, it gets harder so it will stay nice and firm. A cookie you want a little bit softer. There's different baking techniques, we bake it a little bit hotter to dry it out a little bit more. So it's going to be nice and firm. So there's different things that you do with that dough that's going to make it different.

Lloyd: That is logical, but you sort of want a gingerbread house to be a gingerbread cookie. I don't know why, but you want it to taste the same, I guess.

Joe: It's still going to taste the same, it's just going to be harder.

Lloyd: What do you do with the gingerbread houses when the need for them on display is over?

Joe: They are all thrown in the trashcan.

Lloyd: Nobody eats them? Well, as you've pointed out, they probably wouldn't be too edible.

Joe: We've tried to save them from one year to the next, and it just doesn't work out. They just fall apart.

Lloyd: It's easier to do it all over than …

Joe: It's a lot more fun.

Lloyd: Do the people who make the houses enjoy making them?

Joe: Oh, absolutely.

Lloyd: People come and look at your gingerbread house displays. What would surprise them if they knew?

Joe: How much time it takes to do them, I think. Because you know, you can make a gingerbread house at home in a couple of hours. Ours take days to put a house together. And then you still have to put it on a village, and you still have to have the village the right way. You want a little pond on there, you have to put the sugar on there. Then you have to place the houses correctly. It just takes time.

Lloyd: I noticed in some pictures of a previous gingerbread house building project, you also have little things to make it look authentic, like piles of wood or something.

Joe: Yeah. Piles of wood would be sometimes scrap gingerbread, or it could be cinnamon sticks just piled up.

Lloyd: When do you start thinking about next year's?

Joe: Well we started thinking about this year's in January. When it's slow – for us, the slow season's January – we're always thinking about what we're going to be doing for the year. As the year goes on, when things start slowing down, that's when we start doing things. So we start thinking about it right after the end of the year.

Lloyd: So you just finished one, and you start the next. You know, that is a long time, to me, to think about gingerbread houses.

Joe: Well, a long time really goes pretty quick for us.

Lloyd: That’s Colonial Williamsburg: Past & Present this time. Visit history.org to learn more. Check back often, we'll post more for you to download and hear.

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