Ginger All the Way

With all due respect to the classic70-year-old children’s board game, Candy Land, I believe I’ve solved the sweet mystery of where King Kandy, the ruler of the titular Candy Land, has been hiding all these years. It has nothing to do with Lord Licorice, Grandma Nut, or Queen Frostine’s sea of ice cream — though, where we’re going, a peppermint forest might just spring up alongside a mountain of gumdrops. Around the holiday season, I would wager a guess that King Kandy takes up residence at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama, where pastry chef Kimberly Lyons and her team of baking engineers carry on the tradition of building an exacting, awe-inspiring gingerbread replica of the property’s grounds each year — right down to the glittering, saccharine windowpanes and frosting-covered trees.

“Our gingerbread village is a replica of the hotel, so when you walk into the front doors of the main building, that’s the first thing you see. It's big. It takes up almost the whole lobby,” says Lyons. “It has a running train that goes through it, and it's just a really great thing for families to come in and experience. It's a tradition that started before I worked here, but I took on the project and was able to transform it into something neat and different.”

Lyons is always finding new ways to add a fresh sense of whimsy and intricacy to the creation, while also making sure her trusty dog, Nitro, can make a cameo within the gingerbread landscape. “We have an ‘I spy’ game that I've created over the years to really give the kids an opportunity to search for things [inside the gingerbread village] because I like to hide a lot of details in it. We spend a lot of time planning and working on it. Nitro’s in there every year, and there’s also usually a unicorn on there. We'll hide little rubber duckies in the lagoon. Back in 2020, we did snowmen that were wearing masks to reflect the pandemic. We have some cats that like to hang around our front building, so I've hidden cats in there before. Of course, reindeer, Santa Claus … really anything that is going to be fun for the kids to search for.”

The construction process is not only a creative one, but a logistical feat that requires an “all hands on deck” approach from departments throughout the hotel. The pastry team started baking the gingerbread bricks in September this year, and traditionally moves the assembly process to a dedicated ballroom in October until it’s time to unveil the creation in the lobby on Thanksgiving Day.

“We make all of the bricks and do some of the smaller stuff in the bakeshop itself, and then about a month before it goes on display, we move into one of our smaller ballrooms and take over that ballroom for about a month. We just go in there and get down to creating the grass, the gravel, the water, adding all

those fun details, the candy—everything. It's great, too, because it's not always just the pastry cooks working on it. Last year, we had so much help from all the different departments. They came together and really helped build it. Each department took their own building and decorated it, and it came together to create this whole display. It was really beautiful. It’s definitely a bonding moment for the teams, as well.”

If you’re feeling sweetly ambitious and want to take a crack at building a miniature-sized version of your own house out of gingerbread this year, Lyons says the ultimate secret to a sturdy, centerpieceworthy pastry construction is all about the icing: the stiffer, the better—no runny stuff allowed.

“It is all about the icing for me. If you have a good royal icing that holds its shape when you pipe it, you're set, because that royal icing is going to harden pretty quickly and work like a cement for you. Sometimes, though, those icings you get [pre-packaged] are too thin, and your house is never going to stay together with a runny royal icing.”

And even though Lyons and her team spend months handcrafting thousands of individual bricks to build their gingerbread village at the Grand Hotel, she suggests leaving the hyper-detailed, structurally based baking to the pros. “I always recommend just buying a gingerbread kit—it’s so easy. It can be difficult to make the gingerbread pieces at home, so buy the kit, but make your own royal icing. That way, you’re going to have the best time.”

After all, who would know better than the queen of holiday gingerbread herself?