Great Wolf Lodge has a sweet surprise that will be unveiled in just a few days. The annual gingerbread house, one of the best parts of Snowland, is carefully being decorated by hand in the resort lobby. When complete, the house will be covered with more than 4,000 Holiday Peeps and will be large enough for families to dine inside.
For the past few years, my family has visited Great Wolf Lodge around the holidays for the unique experience of dining inside the giant gingerbread house. The design varies each year and Pastry Chef Amie Hanrahan said that a visit to Leavenworth, WA was the inspiration behind this year’s Tudor theme.
This will be Hanrahan’s fourth year creating the massive gingerbread house, which requires months of planning and preparation to make into reality. Baking began in September and the team will use 100 pounds of flour, 50 pounds of brown sugar, and 625 pounds of confectionery sugar in this year’s design.
Great Wolf Lodge’s engineering team is responsible for constructing the house’s wooden frame. If you happened to wander through the resort’s lobby around 3 am, you may have seen them in action. The engineering team also helps operate the scissor lift, which Hanrahan and her team use to reach the roof and chimney.
It can take more than 1,200 labor hours to cover the structure with icing, gingerbread, Peeps, and assorted candy decorations. Hanrahan said that when icing the house, less is often more. If she uses too much of the royal icing, it will just run down the walls. If too little is used, the frame will become visible when the icing dries.
It can be difficult to resist asking about the gingerbread house when you see the construction in progress. Hanrahan said guests frequently ask if it is real gingerbread, if it is real icing, and if they can eat it.
As you might expect, the design incorporates several paw prints, some more obvious than others. Chef Hanrahan said the reverse side of a Peep worked surprisingly well when creating Wiley Wolf’s signature paw print. The “beaks” from the Peeps were used to create the small nails for each digit of the paw. For many children, finding the paw prints is a fun little scavenger hunt.
You can’t eat the house, but Great Wolf Lodge will let you eat inside of it. For a $10 donation, which will go to Ronald McDonald House, families can reserve a time to dine at the large kitchen table inside the gingerbread house. It is a unique experience that is well worth trying if you visit during the Snowland festivities.
And speaking of special memories, Amie met her husband, executive chef Tom Hanrahan, while decorating the gingerbread house a few years ago. Amie and Tom got to know one another after spending hours applying the gingerbread shingles to the house’s roof. They even have a gingerbread house ornament on their Christmas tree to remind them of how they met.
Thank you to Chef Amie and Great Wolf Lodge for the sneak peek at this year’s gingerbread house. I can’t wait to see it when the curtains come down.
Update: Here is a look at the completed gingerbread house. It turned out great!
