The Stein Eriksen Lodge has assembled its annual gingerbread display, a holiday tradition that takes over the lobby during the festive season.
The concept for this year’s installation — a holiday recreation of the Heber Valley Railroad engine — grew out of staff brainstorming sessions, said Executive Pastry Chef Jeremy Garcia.
“Every year we talk to the team about what they want to do, if anyone’s got any fun ideas,” Garcia said.
Sometimes they make a display inspired by recent events or popular movies, but recently they’ve leaned into finding a local connection, he said. In this year’s brainstorm, several team members had recently ridden the historic Heber Valley Railroad, colloquially known as the “Heber Creeper,” and Garcia remembered taking his own kids on Polar Express-style holiday trains.
“The fun thing about this train in particular is there’s a lot of variance of it,” he said. With decades of versions to reference, he said, “we were able to look at the different models, and we could pick one that really spoke to us.”
Then the pastry team sends conceptual sketches to the engineering team, who construct an underlying frame made of wood. That part has to get finished first before Garcia’s team can begin baking the gingerbread cookies for the finished product.
“We’ll have a rough idea in mind of what we want to look like, what parts we want to have, different colors, and where we might need to put gingerbread,” Garcia said. “But until they get it built to a point where we can start to take measurements, we can’t start really making anything.”
He’s learned that lesson the hard way.
“I’ve had years past where it’s like, all right, we’re going to be a month ahead. We’re going to start baking off all these pieces,” he said. “Then all the pieces are the wrong size and they didn’t account for this or whatever. So we end up having to change everything.”
Once engineering completes its portion and the installation moves into the lobby, the pastry team’s countdown begins.
“Once we get it into the lobby, we’re on the clock,” Garcia said. “We’ve only got two days to put all the details on, and usually in moving it, parts break and other things get messed up. … You’ve got to be flexible to make it happen.”
There are plenty other lessons he’s learned over the years, too, like to avoid top-heavy pieces, anything spherical or anything that moves.
“Flat planes and boxy shapes and squares, that’s really easy,” he said. “You can do cylinders, that’s not too hard. But doing spheres is impossible — it’s really hard to do without it looking like a disco ball because gingerbread can’t curve in any way.”
Space is another ongoing challenge. Garcia said he’s learned not to distort scale just to make a concept fit.
“If I start to mess with the height of an object without changing the width or the depth at the same time, things start to look weird pretty fast,” he said. “But if I can preserve the ratios, that’s where you get the best look on things.”
With about 12 feet of space to use in the lobby, they tend to build up, but this year’s train engine is testing that theory.
“Some of these trains are absolutely enormous when you see them in real life,” he said. “There’s no way we could get anywhere close to that. … But I think if you’re a kid, it’s still going to have that cool, big look to it.”
At 6 feet tall, the engine leans into retro holiday charm with dozens of small details — very different from the lodge’s past Thomas the Tank Engine creation, before Garcia’s time.
The build incorporates a range of techniques the team has collected over the years. They used sugar for the windows and a mix of gum paste and chocolate to make a wreath for the front of the engine. Garcia said his team also acquired a chocolate mold that can make a diamond plate-looking steel, which they used in several places. They also figured out how to imprint the gingerbread with a woodgrain design for the train’s railroad ties.
“We’re always trying to think: How heavy is a product? How strong is it? Can it bend? Can it do whatever I want?” Garcia said.
For assembly, the pastry team trades their piping bags and spatulas for drywall spreaders, Garcia said with a laugh. As for adhesive, they stick with tradition.
“We’ve tried using different adhesives and glues, and I find just frosting works really well, just plain royal icing,” he said. “It’s sticky, it dries well and it bonds like cement.”
The finished display lives in the lobby for the month of December, finished ahead of the holiday rush when locals often stop by specifically to see the gingerbread creation before tourists arrive.
“We do get a ton of locals that come up in all those weeks before,” Garcia said. “For a lot of people, it’s like, I just want to go check it out, get our picture taken and see what it’s like.”
That local connection shapes the team’s choices each year.
“We want to find something that can be impressive for people that come visit us, but also have some kind of meaning to people when they come and check it out,” Garcia said. “The locals that come up and check it out, they’re going to understand, ‘Oh, there’s history to this.’”