Five hundred and seventy pounds of icing sugar, 36 litres of egg whites and three litres of lemon juice. That’s what you need to frost a gingerbread house the size of a small apartment.
A team of pastry chefs at the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge took on the tasty task of building the giant gingerbread house.
The life-sized dessert is three metres wide and two metres tall and fills the lobby of the lodge with the sweet smell of gingerbread and candy.
“When you come close to it you can actually smell the sweetness of it,” Shariq Naujeer, a sous chef at the lodge, told CBC Radio’s Edmonton AM Thursday.
It took over 100 hours to bake the 2,200 gingerbread bricks that side the wooden structure, Naujeer said.
This is sous chef Shariq Naujeer’s third Christmas at Jasper Park Lodge. (Jasper Park Lodge)
The gingerbread house doubles as the hotel’s registration desk and is staffed by two employees dressed as elves.
Guests are “blown away” by the house, but they’re discouraged from picking at the gingerbread and candy..
“We have a no-licking poster on [it] because it smells so good,” Naujeer said.
The hotel is already planning to make next years gingerbread house even better, he said.
The gingerbread house is on display until Jan. 7.