Every year I convince my family to go with me to see the gingerbread houses at the local Four Seasons Hotel.   I love visiting gingerbread villages to see the incredible detail and inventive use of edible materials for construction.  Since we rarely get snow around here - and I like it that way - the gingerbread houses take me as close to a wintry village as I want to get. 
I’ve seen hand-made stained-glass windows from sugar, ironwork made of chocolate, a river made of melted Jolly Ranchers and molded fondant people.

Some of the more impressive gingerbread villages are joint efforts between architects and pastry chefs which are auctioned off for charities.  The results are usually amazing. 

Here are some of the bigger gingerbread displays around the country that you may want to check out before January:

Holiday Gingerbread Village at Seattle City Centre
Seattle’s top architecture firms team up with Sheraton Seattle Hotel’s culinary staff to design, bake and build gingerbread holiday creations  benefiting the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund.

Grove Park Inn (Asheville, NC)
Site of the National Gingerbread House Competition & Display each year.

Gingerbread on Broadway - New York City Marriott Marquis on Times Square

New York Botanical Garden

Savannah Westin

Fairmont San Jose

Austin Four Seasons

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.