Wearing red-and-white polka-dotted bows behind her ears, Gracie looks fetchingly festive. Her post-bath embellishment won’t last long, because Gracie is a self-respecting Shetland Sheepdog. But she puts up with it for a little while in order to please her human, Dawn Kuhlman.
In fact, a visitor stepping inside Kuhlman’s cozy bungalow in Auburn, WA, will instantly recognize the retired educator’s affinity for creative flourishes everywhere. Even on a typically drab late-autumn day in the Puget Sound region, chezKuhlman is a cheery place. Textiles with lively patterns, vibrant ceramic pieces, and colorful paintings and photographs – some of which are Kuhlman’s own creations – all contribute to the sunny mood.
After having sufficiently checked out the new arrival at the front door, Gracie curls up for a nap, and Kuhlman and her visitor move to the dining table to view her current work-in-progress. Every November without fail, Kuhlman channels her efforts into the design and creation of a one-of-a-kind miniature gingerbread edifice. Most years it’s a house of some type, but one year it was an entire hillside village, and last year it was a gingerbread train. Whatever the creation, Kuhlman enters it in the Gingerbread House Contest at the local community center, which is just a few blocks away.
Why this annual commitment? It’s a mix of reasons. Under her grandmother’s watchful eye, Kuhlman began baking as a child in Hawaii, where she was the oldest of eight siblings. By the 1970s, the Christmas editions of magazines at grocery checkout stands all seemed to feature gingerbread projects, and Kuhlman couldn’t resist trying something new.
“I’ve always loved miniatures,” Kuhlman confesses. “At one point, as an adult, I owned five dollhouses.”
And once she began her teaching career, she could see the appeal that diminutively scaled objects held for her students, too.
But these days one of the best parts for Kuhlman about working on her annual gingerbread house is that it isn’t a solo effort. For eight years running, one of her sisters, Marie Hastings, rides the Amtrak up from Oregon every November so that the two of them can collaborate on a gingerbread project. They go over Kuhlman’s design ideas, make adjustments, mix up the dough, and use tried-and-true pattern pieces to cut out the necessary shapes. They bake and trim the pieces, then use tinted royal icing to “cement” the gingerbread edifice together before finalizing the detailed decorating.
By now, you’d think that the sisters’ time-tested procedures would be infallible. But that just isn’t the way baking always works out.
“We have our disasters and have to fix things along the way,” Kuhlman acknowledges.
They learned early on that problem-solving is simply part of the process. For the English cottage that they attempted the first year of the contest, they had to experiment with three different-sized versions before settling on the smallest size, which had the best chance of holding up under the roof they’d created of shredded mini-wheat tiles.
This year, the sisters were confounded when the gingerbread recipe that they have always relied on produced uncharacteristically softer gingerbread panels than in previous years. To toughen the cookies up, they popped them back into the oven for a re-bake.
Their plan had been to create a medieval-style gingerbread castle for Santa. Kuhlman’s design included crenellated walls and watchtowers at every corner. A protective moat would surround the castle, with a drawbridge and portcullis ensuring that access to the castle (and presumably Santa’s workshop) would be utterly secure.
But even after the sisters pulled the cookies out after additional baking, they weren’t completely confident that the walls would hold up. They devised internal supports to augment the royal icing that cemented the wall pieces together. Even with that effort, it seemed clear that the plan to install corner watchtowers would have to be scotched. So, the sisters pivoted: “Santa’s Gingerbread Castle” was transformed into a “Santa Fe Gingerbread Castle.” The crenellated walls lend themselves remarkably well to the new concept, and “Santa” is still in the name!
Check out the ornamentation on the resulting sweet architecture –delicately stenciled snowflakes, ornamented with silver dragées; tiny fondant reindeer prancing near the rooftop; sparkling Christmas trees, which are ice cream cones rolled in icing and studded with star sprinkles; and don’t forget the two-hues-of-blue jellybean moat. A corps of little gingerbread Santa’s elves provides this tableau with the final touch.
Now the whole assembly is mounted atop a rotating platform so that all angles of the construction can be viewed while it is exhibited at the Auburn Community & Events Center, 910 Ninth Street SE in Auburn, Washington. The Santa Fe Gingerbread Castle is one of 15 gingerbread structures on display there through December 17. The Center is open Monday through Saturday, and the public is invited to come in to view the houses and vote for their favorites.
Kuhlman received the top vote count once before, and she pays appreciative attention to the creations of the other bakers in the contest every year. But her participation in the contest is about much more than the competition. It’s clear that, as a retired teacher, she particularly values the features that would appeal to youngsters.
“It’s such a delight thinking up ideas for what are we going to do… it keeps you engaged with the world and with people,” she says. “You connect with their joy and you get to share your joy with them – it’s a very sweet tradition.”
Barbara Lloyd McMichael is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest
Barbara McMichael
Barbara Lloyd McMichael is based in the Pacific Northwest and writes about books and culture. She writes a syndicated weekly book review column called “The Bookmonger” that focuses on Northwest books and authors. Her PR for People® Book Review is written exclusively for The Connector.