Existing comment:
A Tradition of Changing Gingerbread House Styles
Chef Raffert's gingerbread house was constructed in a traditional German A-frame style, and each year it got bigger and more elaborate: more candy canes, hard candies, and jelly beans, more gingerbread men and gingerbread reindeer. In 1992, when Executive Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier assumed responsibility for the annual gingerbread house, he expanded the original concept to prevent a village of five gingerbread houses, with hundreds of marzipan figures and spun sugar decorations. The next year he created a replica of White House in gingerbread, designed to scale. It weighed nearly 100 pounds!
Subsequent gingerbread houses have portrayed specific subjects, such as Santa's North Pole Workshop, a winter wonderland castle, treasured monuments of the nation's capital, and views of historic nineteenth- and twentieth-century White House's. Often these subjects have contributed to the overall theme selected by first ladies for the official Christmas tree and the mansion's decorations. To illustrate the 2002 Christmas theme, "All Creatures Great and Small," Chef Mesnier designed a White House with hand-modeled marzipan presidential pets on the South Lawn. For the 2003 "Season of Stories" theme, he placed marzipan figures of characters from popular children's stories on the Truman Balcony, South Portico, and South Lawn. Recent executive pastry chefs have recreated the White House in white chocolate. |