Today in 2023, a news report on the end of an era: a pastry chef in Anchorage, Alaska was, for the last time, building a massive holiday village out of gingerbread.
This was Joe Hickel, who worked as pastry chef at the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage, Alaska for more than four decades.
Hickel said he remembered seeing gingerbread houses on display at a grocery store when he was growing up.
He decided to build his own display for the hotel in 1978, using a Wilton baking cookbook to figure out how to build a few houses and snowmen.
His creation was three feet long and five feet wide, so it could sit on the counter at the front desk.
But that didn’t last: over time, the annual displays kept getting bigger and bigger, until the 2023 village was 270 square feet in all.
The ingredients for one recent village included 1,100 pounds of icing, a thousand pounds of powdered sugar, 250 pounds of chocolate and 80 pans of gingerbread.
Hickel would start baking those gingerbread walls in July.
The baking and design work would take hundreds of hours on top of his regular responsibilities as pastry chef.
Then, for two weeks in December, he’d build and build and build, adding all kinds of little details to make the village come to life.
He did all this building in a public part of the hotel, so while putting together mountains and cabins and so forth he might also stop to answer visitors’ questions, or give them a little taste of icing.
The final display would attract huge crowds; it was as much a tradition for some locals to see each new gingerbread village as it was for Hickel to build them.
In 2023, he retired as the hotel’s pastry chef and announced he would do one last display, so that he and his many fans could enjoy the spectacle one more time.
If you missed it, there are videos online of the whole process, which are best enjoyed while eating a gingerbread cookie or two.
Another story from this day in 2023: a woman in China posted a photo of her food while at a restaurant, like so many of us have done.
Only this photo included the QR code for ordering food at her table.
People online decided to help themselves and added some $60,000 US dollars worth of food to the bill.
I hope the restaurant either gave her a refund, or a really big takeout container.
After decades of sugary magic, Hotel Captain Cook pastry chef ices his final gingerbread village (Anchorage Daily News)
Food faux pas: China diner shocked by US$60,000 bill for meal after accidentally posting photo of dish ordering QR code online (South China Morning Post)
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Cropped photo of a gingerbread village in Anchorage, Alaska, 2013. (Photo by Wonderlane via Flickr/Creative Commons https://flic.kr/p/nEWJpn)
