By Jon Chown
Karen Hawkinson has built a miniature village unlike anything found on a map. She started several months ago, planning the layout and then building it to show at the Santa Cruz County Fair.
Her creation includes seven buildings rising a little over a foot tall, all decorated and trimmed neatly, with stairways and cobblestone streets connecting them. And it’s all made of gingerbread.
Every wall, roof and walkway required careful planning, baking, assembly and is decorated in great detail.
“This one took longer than any other one I’ve ever made because it had seven buildings in it,” Hawkinson said.
Karen Hawkinson shows off her creation.
The project stretched across six months. Hawkinson began designing the buildings in January. She baked the gingerbread pieces in March, started putting the village together in April and finished it at the end of June.
Before baking anything, Hawkinson built models of the structures with foam core board and pinned them together to make sure the buildings fit correctly. Once she was satisfied with the design, she took the models apart and used each piece as a pattern for cutting the gingerbread.
“I have to make the model first out of foam core board,” Hawkinson said. “Then you pin it together and make sure everything fits. Then you take it apart and cut the gingerbread out.”
After baking the walls and other sections, Hawkinson covered them with gum paste, a thick sugar dough similar to fondant. She used textured rollers to press brick and stone patterns into the gum paste. Then came the slowest part of the project — painting the details.
“It takes forever to paint every little brick,” she said.
Because the gum paste is white, Hawkinson left the narrow lines between the painted bricks untouched to look like grout.
The gingerbread also had to be strong enough to hold up the buildings, designed to look three stories tall.
Hawkinson used what she called “construction-grade gingerbread,” made without eggs or leavening. The recipe produces hard, flat pieces that are better for building than eating.
“It dries really hard,” she said.
Hawkinson added plenty of spices to make the gingerbread smell good, even though much of it was later covered with gum paste. She said the entire village is edible, at least in theory.
“You wouldn’t want to eat it,” she said. “It’s not good when it’s fresh either because it’s made with construction-grade gingerbread.”
The pieces dried so hard that even her dog struggled to chew some of the scraps, she said.
Hawkinson even uses a table saw she got as a Christmas gift last year to straighten the edges of the baked pieces before joining them.
“It’s really small,” she said, creating about a 6-inch by 6-inch square with her hands to show the size of it.
Hawkinson has shown her gingerbread creations at the Santa Cruz County Fair before. She made her first one before the 1989 earthquake, but doesn’t enter one every year. She said this gingerbread village is probably her fifth creation.