The World’s Largest Gingerbread House

They say everything’s bigger in Texas and when it comes to gingerbread houses, they aren’t kidding. This past holiday season, the Traditions Club, a local golf and residential community partnered with the St. Joseph Health System and a local home healthcare organization to break the world record for gingerbread houses.

Enlisting the help of a number of local contractors and organizations, including a commercial and residential roofing company to top it all off, they built the house at the Traditions Club in Bryan, Texas. Big enough to walk through, visitors were charged an entrance fee to do so, and to get a picture with Santa. All the net profits from the project, over $200,000 before the house was dismantled just before Christmas, were donated to the St. Joseph’s Level II Trauma Centre.

To make sure there was no disputing the claim to being the ‘world’s largest’, organizers invited officials from Guinness World Records to verify the feat.

Except for a wood supporting frame, almost the entire house was made of gingerbread, including the roof that covered the 2,500 sq. ft. structure.

The Record-Breaking Statistics

Officially, at 39,202 cubic feet, the Texas gingerbread house beat the previous record-holder, a 36,600 cubic foot house, built inside the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. And everything else about the new winner is just as amazing:

• Dimensions: the house was 60 feet long, 42 feet wide and over 20 feet at its highest point.
• 1,800 pounds of butter used in the recipe
• 7,200 eggs
• 7,200 pounds of flour
• 3,000 pounds of brown sugar
• 225 gallons of molasses
• 22,304 pieces of candy for decoration
• 35,823,400 calories

One Last Statistic: Bees love sweet stuff. After its construction, the house attracted an estimated 2,000 bees. Organizers called in a local bee keeper to corral the interlopers before any of them could put the sting on the hundreds of people who visited the house every day.

Source: www.schulteroofing.com