Disney: Gingerbread castle rises at Contemporary
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
In yet another sign of the emerging holiday season, a gingerbread castle has been installed at Disney’s Contemporary Resort. This year’s design has both 50th-anniversary elements and the influences of Imagineer Mary Blair, down to a flock of five-legged goats.
The structure officially opened Friday morning with a brief ceremony that included the more than 30 bakers who created the 17-foot-high structure, starting in midsummer.
The edible castle was baked in the Contemporary kitchen, had some assembly in a conference room before waiting in a dozen sections stowed in backstage hallways for a while before two days of construction on the fourth-floor concourse of the resort.
Some decoration is done before setting up for the public.
“We decorate it ahead of time because once it gets put up in the lobby, we can’t reach that height,” Amber Vega, pastry sous chef, said earlier this week. “Anything here that needs to be smoothed out, we do ahead of time.”
It’s the 11th year of gingerbread structures at the Contemporary.
“It’s been Cinderella Castle for the past few years. This year it has a 50th anniversary kind of overlay on the castle. So you’ll see the gold on the blue there, like it is on the actual castle now,” Vega said.
Walt Disney World, which opened in 1971, is continuing its celebration into the spring.
“The holiday-services team also has a part of it because they do the actual construction and, like, screwing it together on stage,” Vega said.
The gingerbread castle is fronted by two golden Mickey and Minnie figures, sort of flat versions of the Fab 50 statues in Disney World theme parks, another part of the 50th anniversary.
Visitors may purchase a gingerbread brick that “is actually the same receipt and the same brick that’s going to be on the castle,” Vega said. Additional sweets and commemorative pins are on sale, too.
Disney says the Contemporary castle has 4,000 gingerbread bricks. It was made of 111 pounds of gingerbread spice, 511 eggs, 611 pounds of sugar, 1,011 pounds of flour and 439 jars of honey, among other ingredients.
There are 11 five-legged goats hidden on the castle, a tribute to the creature created by Blair for the mosaic that towers over the Contemporary concourse.
“She believed that we all had imperfections,” Diane Petit, general manager of the Contemporary, explaining the goat theme during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the castle.
The gingerbread castle, designed by Walt Disney Imagineering, also is backed by images from the “it’s a small world” attraction, one of Blair’s signature theme-park works.
Friday’s opening was attended by chefs who helped whip up this year’s castle.
“When we’re making it the whole bakery smells like Christmas. I mean, when you’re making the gingerbread in October, it’s not as enthusiastic as December and we’re making it. ... It’s still exciting,” Vega said. “We did play Christmas music while we were decorating it on Halloween.”
Email me at dbevil@orlandosentinel.com. Subscribe to the Theme Park Rangers newsletter at orlandosentinel.com/newsletters or the Theme Park Rangers podcast at orlandosentinel.com/travel/attractions/theme-park-rangers-podcast.
