Culinary arts sophomores Melissa Martin and Katelyn Comerford built a gingerbread replica of Eastern State Penitentiary for a holiday showcase in Center City last winter.
When Drexel culinary students make gingerbread houses, they really get into it: carefully piped icing roofs, Twizzler bows, candy cane pillars, 66 pounds of flour, six pounds of butter and four pounds of icing.
And that was just for two gingerbread houses, built in a matter of days, a week before finals last December.
Four undergraduate students in the Culinary Arts & Science Program made gingerbread versions of two Philly landmarks — Boathouse Row and Eastern State Penitentiary — to display in a holiday showcase called “Sugar & Spice & Everything Nice” at the Logan Hotel in Center City.
The students baked the dough on a Friday, froze it over the weekend, baked the pieces on the following Monday and Tuesday, started construction on Tuesday and Wednesday, and decorated and fit the pieces together on Wednesday and Thursday, all in order to have the gingerbread houses ready to be transported and displayed at the Center City hotel on Friday.
“It seemed like a fun thing to do for the holidays that was kind of stressful in a different way from other finals prep,” says Nora Vaughan, a freshman who helped cook, build and frost the Boathouse Row gingerbread house, along with fellow freshman Lauren Miller.