The Making of the Gaylord Rockies Resort’s Gingerbread Display

For the pastry team at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center, the holiday season brings the biggest baking project of the year: the gingerbread display.

Historians believe that gingerbread goes as far back as the tenth century. In the nineteenth century, the publication of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” popularized creating edible houses adorned with licorice and gumdrops in Germany, with the tradition eventually spreading to other parts of Europe and the United States.

When Brielle Fratellone arrived at Gaylord Rockies in October 2021 to take on the role of executive pastry chef, she knew she wanted to bring that holiday tradition to the resort. “It’s in my personality. I love big projects. I love having something really exciting, something different, something I’ve never done before,” she says.

Plus, she had the resources to tackle an ambitious gingerbread project: The pastry team comprises twenty people, including three sous chefs. “It’s really just a showcase of what we do here,” Fratellone notes. “It’s very unusual for a pastry shop to make lollipops, marshmallows and everything from scratch, so we’re utilizing what makes this team so special and putting it on display.”

A dramatic display of pastry and sweets fits right into the resort’s over-the-top holiday celebrations. The annual Christmas at the Gaylord Rockies is its most popular public attraction, and the centerpiece is the ICE! Experience, which started in 2001 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and has since been replicated at every Gaylord location as an annual tradition. This year at Gaylord Rockies, forty ice artisans were flown in from Harbin, China, to carve two million pounds of ice into life-sized tableaux from the holiday classic A Christmas Story.

The festivities also include performances of “Cirque: Spirit of Christmas” led by Broadway director Neil Goldberg as well as a Mistletoe Village featuring a Build-A-Bear Workshop, Yuletide Street Market, Elf Training Academy and various activities such as photos with Santa, story time with Mrs. Claus, and a gingerbread decorating station at the Mistletoe Sweet Shop.

The front two windows of the Sweet Shop is where you’ll find the pastry team’s gingerbread re-creation of an alpine ski village, reminiscent of Breckenridge, Vail and Aspen. It’s a pivot from last year’s gingerbread display, when the team created a life-sized, 25-foot tall gingerbread mansion in the lobby that visitors walked through to get to the pastry pop-up store, Baking Spirits Bright, where they could purchase hot chocolate, housemade pastries and sweets.

With Baking Spirits Bright currently under construction, the pasty team decided to scale back the size of the display and double down on fine details and technique. “My team loved making the gingerbread house, so we [decided to pivot to] where everyone decorates their own gingerbread houses,” explains Fratellone. The display is also meant to provide visitors “an inspiration piece, and [we] used all the same candy that you buy to decorate your house.”

The team stocks 5,000 gingerbread house kits, ranging from $20 to $32, and sells candy by the pound. Whereas visitors only spend an hour or so decorating their pre-made kits, Fratellone’s gingerbread project started back in July. “I got the blueprint drawings of what the window display would be, so I knew the dimensions of the two windows we had to fill,” she explains. “Then we took that information and divided up the work into how many different builds we were going to have. So I knew we were going to do a little retail shop area with a little coffee shop and a bakery, and we wanted to do a clock tower and a gondola. So all our pastry team was then assigned a building so everybody gets their opportunity to be creative and design their own.”

Once Fratellone approved each member’s design, team members started templating their houses out of cardboard. On Halloween, they began baking gingerbread – 700 pounds of it.

Although the gingerbread is technically edible, the recipe is optimized to be a sturdy construction. When baked, it “turns into a brick, so it’s rock-hard,” Fratellone says. “There’s no milk in it, there’s a few eggs, no leavener, and that way it just bakes like a little brick…but it still smells like gingerbread; it’s full of spices and molasses.”

Baking was followed by two weeks of assembling, frosting, decorating and transporting the houses a quarter-mile to Mistletoe Village, where final finishes are added. Gingerbread displays are not something pastry chefs learn at school, so the team relied on Google research, Pinterest and previous experiences. “It’s a great learning opportunity for all my team, who will eventually leave and take on their own [shop],” Fratellone notes.

The pastry chef also has some gingerbread tips and tricks for amateurs and professionals alike. First, she says, make sure your royal icing is really thick – it’s not about the mouthfeel or flavor, it’s about creating a glue-like substance for construction.

“I also recommend that you build your gingerbread house [first] with the walls. Let it dry, then put the roof on the next day,” she adds. That creates “a very stable base to hold your roof, and it will stay in one piece – because that’s usually the saddest, when you start decorating and the whole roof falls off.”

If you’re in a time crunch, pre-made kits work well, since no one actually eats the house, and the fun is in decorating it, Fratellone says. Some of her favorite candies to use are nonpareils for roof shingles as well as chocolate-covered sunflower seeds to replicate tiny Christmas lights.

In total this year, the pastry team used 300 pounds of flour, 200 pounds of sugar and molasses, 100 pounds of candy, and fifty pounds of shredded coconut “snow” to create twenty gingerbread houses sitting in front of 35 gingerbread mountains. Fratellone estimates it took 300 labor hours to complete from planning to finish. In the final two-week push, the team pulled twelve-hour shifts while consuming way, way too much of the candy, she admits.

The results are stunning. Each miniature building showcases different techniques, yet the display is cohesive and brings a classy, elegant alpine ski village to life. It includes a replica of the Baking Spirits Bright shop replete with an isomalt window looking into shelves holding miniature pies, croissants and cookies made from fondant. The toy shop has individually crafted toys, and the Christmas store has a charming Santa sitting on top with a big belly made of Rice Krispies. There’s also a classic A-frame cottage with candy cane framing, a pretzel log cabin, and even a towering Christmas tree made of fifty individual cookies stacked on top of each other.

There’s even an animatronic piece – a ski lift dubbed the “Sugar Express Gondola.”

“I basically bought a [German] toy and deconstructed it and rebuilt it in gingerbread,” explains Fratellone. When she turned it on for the first time, “immediately, the gondola hit one of the pieces of cookie and fell off. …You have to get the ropes at just the right angle and just far enough apart, get enough tension on the line – and it took a minute!”

Although this gingerbread display is for viewing only, visitors can taste plenty of other creations from the team at the resort. Favorites include the carrot cake with brown butter cream cheese frosting at Mountain Pass Sports Bar, chocolate ricotta amaretto cheesecake with cherries at Vista Montagne restaurant, and the salted caramel gelato available at the Sugar Plum Gelato pop-up.

While the gingerbread construction is complete, the team is now in the midst of the Thanksgiving pie rush and a month-long marathon of holiday parties and gatherings. But each morning, Fratellone or one of her team members make sure to check on the gingerbread display to do touch-ups and repairs – and to admire their handiwork for a moment.

Christmas at the Gaylord Rockies runs until January 1, 2024, and is free to attend. ICE! and Cirque: Spirit of Christmas tickets must be purchased in advance. Visit christmasatgaylordrockies.marriott.com for prices and hours of operation for shows and activities.

Brielle Fratellone’s Gingerbread Man Recipe
While the gingerbread for the display isn’t meant to be eaten, this recipe is what the pastry team uses for its tasty gingerbread man cookies.

Ingredients
3¾ cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
3 tablespoons butter, unsalted
¾ cup dark brown sugar
1 egg
½ cup molasses
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions
Cream together butter, sugar and salt. Add in egg, molasses and vanilla extract. Add in spices and flour. Mix until combined. Cover and chill dough for about two hours. Roll dough to ¼ inch thick and cut into desired shapes. Bake at 350 for ten to fifteen minutes. The larger the cut shape, the longer the baking time.