Gingerbread DKR

When I signed up for school, back in February, I heard about the gingerbread competition. I was intrigued. I thought it might be fun to participate. I told my buddy Greg that when it rolled around, we were making a gingerbread version of Darrel K Royal Texas Memorial Stadium. And that's what we did.

Behold:



We spent a week on this project. A loooong week that culminated in a 10 hour, 6pm to 4am all-nighter. It's not quite as tight as we would have liked. There was a little bowing, which created gaps. There were a lot of cracks. So many cracks. This stuff was super dry and a quite brittle when it was thin - so our patching efforts can be seen.

That being said, how awesome is this thing? The sheer scope of this project is awesome. 12 batches of gingerbread. Forty pounds! No one else took up the entire 2'x2' board like we did. Everyone else made houses and churches. We made a STADIUM.

We dropped it off this morning on almost no sleep. I returned early this afternoon to find out our fate - we just missed the top 3. According to Chef Jennie, we were the "critic's pick". The judges, the chefs, the people that went to the event, even Chef Herve Charbot - the head of the pastry program at the Ottowa LCB campus - were quite impressed. A few technical errors, which we were aware of and were to be expected, given this was our first from-scratch gingerbread house, kept us out of the medals. But we had a blast and learned from our mistakes.

Here are a few pictures of production. For some reason, it won't let me upload more. I'll put the rest in a folder on my facebook page. Check 'em out!