Gingerbread Decorations

 

So beloved is the Christmas treat of gingerbread, that even Shakespeare penned a tribute to it in 1598, a character in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” saying, “And I had but one penny in the world, thou should’st have it to buy gingerbread.”

Gingerbread has had lots of uses and ingredients throughout the centuries and even today it can apply to any sweet treat that has ginger blended with honey, treacle or molasses.

History

While it is now considered a Christmas tradition, Rhonda Massingham Hart in her book “Making Gingerbread Houses,” said the first-known recipe for gingerbread predates Christianity and came from Greece in 2400 BC.

By the late Middle Ages, Europeans were making gingerbread cookies shaped like animals or people and decorated with gold leaf. They were found in medieval fairs in England, France, Holland and Germany, according to PBS.org. Tradition has it that Shakespeare’s queen, Elizabeth I, came up with the idea of decorating cookies to look like important people who came to court.

It was in Germany, thanks to some other writers, that the cookie became a house. Bakers were inspired by the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel.”

German bakers formed a gingerbread guild, while in Sweden, nuns were baking it as a cure for indigestion.

Here in America, English colonists brought gingerbread with them as they settled the New World. Tradition has it that the cookies were used to bribe Virginia voters. George Washington’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, was said to have preferred a softer recipe for cookies than what was eaten in Europe. When Marquis de Lafayette visited her in Virginia, she served him this treat which became known as “Gingerbread Lafayette” and was passed down through the generations.

Bigger is Better

While even the smallest of gingerbread cookies can make a great treat and families around the world enjoy the messy but creative undertaking of building a gingerbread house, some people get serious about setting records.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest gingerbread house was built in 2013 at Traditions Golf Club in Bryan, Texas. They had to get a building permit for the house that used 1,800 pounds of butter, 7,200 eggs and 1,080 ounces of ground ginger. The house, which was almost 40,000 cubic feet, required 4,000 gingerbread bricks. If you’d tried to eat it? You’d consume 35.8 million calories.

Jon Lovitch, the creator of GingerBread Lane and the one-time sous-chef at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel, has broken the record several times for the “largest gingerbread village.” According to his website, the entire village is entirely edible. He doesn’t use cardboard, stands or even fake snow. He spends an entire year making the parts of the village and then they are displayed in cities around the U.S. Each year, the village has at least 1,251 houses.