A Who-Ville Win
ABC Good Morning America invited me to participate in this year's gingerbread competition. The premise: each of the four news anchors were to pair up with a New York pastry chef, and together build a gingerbread masterpiece based on the anchor's favorite Christmas movie. My anchor was Ginger Zee, and her chosen movie was "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas".
We tried a lot of things for the first time. The mountain was made of a sticky melange of royal icing and Rice Crispies. We then covered it in plastic wrap and foil to keep everything together, and to create a canvas for the patchwork of grey and black iced cookies and icicles.
I love how the Who-Ville houses turned out! The first couple attempts had sharp a-line roofs that just didn't look "Who-y" enough. We took them apart and shaved the facades down to round them out. The curved roofs were shaped over a magnum wine bottle like tuiles. Each house, as in the real Who-Ville, was decorated differently, although I love the repetition of the iced Twizzler chimneys!
Who-Ville would not have been complete without its signature arch, and the proud Christmas tree is there to greet you when you enter.
So did we win? Yeah, we did!! I believe what set us apart from the talented competition was our fun and playful use of color-rich candy, and allowing the gingerbread itself to take some of the limelight.