What better way to celebrate the holidays than making and decorating a gingerbread house? This fun tradition allows you to release your creative side while making something tasty, but the senior class of the Academy for Culinary Arts and Hospitality Administration (ACAHA) takes this activity beyond making a simple, small gingerbread house at home. This past winter, in December of 2023, the ACAHA seniors built a large gingerbread display inspired by Barbie’s Dream House. One can imagine it takes a lot of teamwork, cooperation, and determination to pull it off, but what exactly is the process like behind this annual project?
Chef T, the culinary arts teacher at BCA, explained that this tradition of making a gingerbread house began around twenty years ago as a friendly competition among each ACAHA senior separately making a small gingerbread house of their own. Over the past years, the competition groups gradually evolved from individual ones to groups of two or three students, until finally incorporating the entire class when, one year, the seniors decided to make a large display resembling Hogwarts from the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.
Before students can get their hands dirty in the kitchen, hours of work and collaboration happen behind the scenes to account for every detail of this project. “A lot of preparation goes into creating a gingerbread house,” said Sylwia Zak, a senior in ACAHA. “It’s actually a lot harder than you would expect!”
Preparation initially begins with a unique theme to incorporate, as it is important that all students in the academy can agree on a focus to be resembled in this project. Students compiled various photos together to help them visualize various ideas for this project, providing inspiration and helping hem plan out the specific ways to execute their gingerbread house. Possible themes ranged from a basketball court to a wintry London display, with the class voting and ultimately coming to the decision of Barbie Dream House as their theme of the year.
With their chosen theme fitting into the 2023 craze over Greta Gerwig’s movie Barbie, the ACAHA seniors strived to replicate the iconic culture that this movie developed throughout the past year with a wintry twist of their own.
From there, it became crucial to properly measure ingredients, physical dimensions, and time in order for each piece of the puzzle to fall into place for the class’s vision; one error in precision can lead to many more problems down the road.
While having more hands on-deck may seem to be a more efficient way to get things done, it quickly became clear that working on one structure with 22 different students became an unanticipated challenge in itself. “The kitchen often got extremely crowded and chaotic,” said one senior, “which led some students to sit and draw out plans with more detail as we went along instead of mindlessly rolling out more dough.”
Furthermore, the senior detailed that she, and the rest of her class, had expected more help from underclassmen. In previous years, it was mandatory for ACAHA students who weren’t seniors to help with the project during any free time, specifically to alleviate the amount of dirty dishes and messes in the kitchen. While she explained that this limited amount of help from the other grades may not have completely affected the outcome of the display, it became a factor that had influenced the processes happening in the kitchen by adding more work for the seniors to complete.
The amount of time it takes for this project to be completed and put together extends far past time in class. Seniors solely meet with Chef T twice a week, which meant that students had to sacrifice spare time within their schedules to contribute to the gingerbread house in any way they could.
“The entire class must put the same amount of energy, passion, and work into the gingerbread house in order for it to get done,” said Sylwia. In other words, a great effort and time commitment from every student is required to put this tradition into motion. Even though many students had limited amounts of study halls, extracurricular activities to participate in, or work to go to after school, spending time both inside and outside school hours was a challenging yet pivotal aspect of this project that ultimately allowed it to come together in the end.
Throughout the entire process, Chef T acted as a guide and mentor for the seniors. He offered tips and advice, recipes, and culinary techniques for the students to follow based upon what he believed to be best in order to accomplish their designs; but the model itself and the inspiration behind it stemmed from the seniors’ ideas and goals. Apart from just guiding the process behind the gingerbread house, Chef T explained that he “tried to shift the project to focus on the leadership and teamwork skills necessary to succeed in the kitchen.”
After all of the ACAHA seniors’ hard work to put this gingerbread house display together, it finally became available for all of BCA to see in front of room 226 on December 21, 2023. Barbie’s house stands as the two-story centerpiece with a pink roof and pink windows while Raquelle’s one-story house lies on the left with a light purple roof and side wall, and the design sits complete with a palm tree, four surfboards sitting against the houses, and a bright pool shaped like Barbie’s profile. The intricately decorated Christmas tree, icing piped as icicles, wreaths on each gingerbread house, and powdered sugar covering the display to resemble snow emphasize the winter coziness of the project as a whole, bringing out the essence of gingerbread house making as a tradition.
This challenging project allowed the ACAHA seniors to use the culinary skills they’ve cultivated throughout their high school years and build a creative gingerbread display with their peers, bringing unity to the class as a whole while also allowing them to have fun along the way. Being a part of a commitment such as this one brings a great sense of accomplishment to the seniors for all their hard work and determination, and, as Chef T perfectly put it: “it is nice to see the joy and holiday spirit it brings to the entire school community.”
