Just as the fog settles over San Francisco in July and the cable cars are overcrowded with tourists, the ovens in the kitchen of the Fairmont Hotel go on and the staff is busy.

They bake gingerbread cookies and mark the beginning of a five-month attempt to build a gingerbread house with the stature and complexity of a Victorian Queen Annes.

This year’s house plan called for 8,000 gingerbread cookies made from a typical recipe that includes flour, sugar, molasses, spices and butter. These were produced in summer and autumn and stored in a temperature-controlled room until construction began in November.

“It gets stale, but the stale the gingerbread, the harder the brick and the more stable the house,” says Emma Curtis, the hotel’s kitchen and restaurant manager. “It still smells good. You see people walking through the lobby and sniffing it.

“We don’t promote it, but we see people eating it too. The adults are the worst.”

Like the Christmas tree in Union Square and the wreaths in the windows of Macy’s, the Fairmont gingerbread house – now in its 11th year – has become a lovable San Francisco vacation tradition. It is enjoyed by hotel guests and locals who go on trips to the two-story House of Sweets annually while their children explore the sweet delicacies while sipping sparkling wine in the lobby.

The 2019 creation is the largest yet at 25 feet high and 45 feet wide; It has a private dining area that can seat up to 10 people. The exterior is adorned with twinkling lights, swirls of royal frosting, and a mix of candy. Lollipops grow in the planters, gummy candies frame the arched windows, and marshmallow sugar peeps in the shape of trees, reindeer, gingerbread and snowmen are used everywhere.

“Candy is ordered months in advance,” says Curtis. “We bought the last 15 boxes of peeps trees from Peeps. We’ll keep peeps in business.”

A total of 1,900 pounds of candy were used and everything was put together with 3,500 pounds of royal icing.

A team of six has spent more than 1,200 hours assembling this year’s house. Among them was Larry Walton who worked on the last 10 houses. Walton works as a painter for the hotel for most of the year, but in the fall he changes to the role of senior engineer at the gingerbread house, taking responsibility for the lights and animation display.

This year the main room features a scene in front of Santa’s house with letters flowing out of a mailbox. The letters were written to Santa Claus by the children of the hotel staff. One elf plays peak-a-boo, jumping in and out through a hole in the ground, and another elf climbs a ladder to the top of a reindeer barn.

Walton is handy and uses small motors made from everyday objects to set the figures and lawn ornaments in motion. He used a car seat motor to kick Santa’s legs out of the chimney.

On the gingerbread roof, Walton has put together a scene from Lombard Street, which is surrounded by Victorian houses, themed after “A Christmas Carol”. A cable car goes down the crooked road and the trees are shrouded in lights.

“I spent a day and a half putting all the Christmas lights on the miniature houses,” he says. “You have to cut the wires in half and re-solder.”

Walton says the team has learned from its mistakes over the years and is constantly improving the design.

The kitchen staff once tried adding vinegar to the icing because they heard the recipe would last longer. “You didn’t love the result”
he said. “It changed the smell.”

Another year a ceiling painted with chocolate melted and dripped on the heads of the visitors. Once a smoke machine placed in the chimney produced moisture and made the floor slippery.

“I kind of know what works and what doesn’t, and I can say, ‘Hey, we have to do this because I went through it,'” said Walton. “We used to hang gingerbread on the ceiling. And pieces cracked and fell on people.”

Amy Graff is a digital editor for SFGATE. Email: agraff@sfgate.com.

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It was Christmas morning, and nothing moved in Alexis Gallagher’s house: not his wife Ringae, not his twelve-year-old son Odysseus, and not his nine-year-old daughter Callisto.

However, the puppy was awake at 7:30 a.m. and listless to go for a walk. So Gallagher Hermes – after the ancient Greek god, not to be confused with the fashion designer – leashed the Bernadoodle and made the ten-minute hike to Corona Heights Park. There they confronted what Gallagher called a “Christmas Miracle”.

On the red gravel, overlooking the misty San Francisco skyline, stood a towering monolith made of gingerbread. Glued together with icing, the triangular structure was supported by plywood and covered with colorful gummy candies.

Woke up to be walking the dog here in San Francisco and Corona Heights Park on Christmas morning, a mysterious GINGERBREAD MONOLITE has appeared! pic.twitter.com/ykcw1LqIqN

– Sixelå! (@alexisgallagher) December 25, 2020

Gallagher gaped.

Hermes meanwhile tried to eat the gingerbread structure.

The monolith came as an unexpected surprise in a dark year that saw more than 18,900 people hospitalized with coronavirus across California as of Friday, including nearly 4,000 in intensive care and an ICU availability of 0% in Southern California.

The monolith in San Francisco was reminiscent of a metal sculpture that appeared near the summit of the Pine Mountain Trail in Atascadero, a small town in San Luis Obispo County, in early December. This was very similar to monoliths left behind in Utah and Romania in November, reminiscent of the iconic monolith from the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

the gingerbread monolith is real. so real that I even watched someone lick it and then I started saying a prayer for her. With that in mind, happy monolith! pic.twitter.com/ceyGDbKPVB

– Josh Ackerman (@joshuaackerman) December 25, 2020

But while the one in Atascadero caused controversy, the one in San Francisco only seemed to please.

“How could you not call it a Christmas miracle?” Gallagher, 44, said over the phone from the security of his home. “A very well constructed and well constructed miracle at that -” He paused when the barking began in the background. “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s the dog. But yeah, I thought, ‘This city isn’t dead yet. It still has ghost.’ “

Lizzie Johnson is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: ljohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LizzieJohnsonnn

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During the 2018 holiday season, Chef Anthony Strong longed for a weekend getaway to Lake Tahoe but couldn’t justify the time – his restaurant in Mission District, Prairie, was just 2 months old at the time. “So I decided to build a winter ski hut out of gingerbread instead,” says Strong, 35.

Strong fell into the gingerbread house, which was partly inspired by his background in construction, between jobs, and it has since become an annual tradition. In the past two years, he’s moved from traditionally decorated gingerbread shapes to the slimmer style of mid-century modern architecture, and he’s sharing his enthusiasm in a series of gingerbread ski lodge workshops in Prairie this month.

In 2018, Strong drew on the retro-futurism of the space colonies by Bay Area illustrator Rick Guidice, which were shiny, optimistic visions of cosmic suburbs commissioned by the NASA Art Program in 1975. Strong’s original ski cabin had an unmistakable butterfly roof, a carport, surrounded by a “breeze block” wall made of peppermint-colored lifesavers and large panes of caramelized sugar glass – after all, an intimate connection with the outside world is a guiding principle of the mid-century modern design movement.

The house had an amber glow, as if there was a crackling fireplace inside, and was warm and inviting in a winter wonderland of finely ground coconut snow, candy-coated chocolate stones, and a forest of cut evergreen gingerbread trees.

In addition to its modern silhouette, the hut has also moved away from the traditional deluge of sweets and icing flourishes that go back to the beginnings of gingerbread making in Germany in the 16th century.

“Gaudy is not an option,” says the chef, who recently upgraded the foot-long, 9-inch-high cabin with more sophistication than last year’s model – entire walls are now made of sugar glass, and the snowy evergreens are brilliantly represented by sprigs of rosemary, an ingenuity of Strong’s girlfriend Katherine Altonaga, 31. “Doing something beautiful is first and foremost.”

When Strong hosts his gingerbread ski lodge workshops in Prairie this month, there are bottomless dragees, gummy candies, and candy canes for those prone to unbridled jewelry. The different parts of the structure are pre-baked and pre-cut for the students; Strong achieves crisp lines by using an Exacto knife on sugar slices and homemade gingerbread that are still warm.

Chef Anthony Strong shows off his modern mid-century Tahoe vacation lodge in San Francisco, California on Wednesday, November 20, 2019.Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

While some homemade gingerbread houses are known to sag or slim over time, the chef uses an overly sticky, heavily overworked batter that, despite its rich golden color and seductive aroma of molasses, ginger, and cinnamon, he calls “bombproof”. Likewise the “cement-strong” glaze, which is filled into piping bags for the workshops. The glue made from finely sifted powdered sugar and egg white is used to glue the gingerbread seams together.

“The house is probably not meant to be eaten,” says Strong. “At least not without a liter of milk on the side.”

The Noe Valley resident built his first gingerbread house in 2016 after leaving his veteran post as head chef at Delfina Restaurant Group. For the first time in 11 years, Strong was free over the holidays. The result of all that free time was a two story suburban style home, heavy on the decorative frosting swirls and surrounded by a picket fence.

“I had so much fun doing it that I couldn’t help it. I preserved it with hairspray and then put it in my closet, ”says the Minnesota native, who grew up helping his father build furniture, porches, and additions to houses. Strong was even the general contractor for Prairie, overseeing the skimpy design and construction, which features indigo-colored plywood walls instead of expensive tile or wallpaper, as well as some of Rick Guidice’s cosmic prints. Modern gingerbread houses seemed like a natural intersection between Strong’s culinary know-how and design talent.

Chef Anthony Strong and Katherine Altonaga work on the carport of their modern mid-century Tahoe vacation lodge in San Francisco, California on Wednesday, November 20, 2019.Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

In 2017, he tried a 2 foot tall, designed by Dr. Seuss-inspired fun house with a cantilevered colonnade that seemed to defy gravity. In its current mid-century modern phase, Strong has considered recreating the historic Kentucky Fried Chicken building in Palm Springs with its towering, wing-like roof, yet another retro-futuristic form of the era. Maybe next year.

The perfecting of the modern ski lodge from the middle of the century was a suitable holiday activity for the busy restaurateur and snow-hungry Midwesterner, which he is now doing with Altonaga. You’d think that building a gingerbread miniature wouldn’t have the restorative benefits that an actual retreat in a true Lake Tahoe cabin could offer, but Strong would contradict that.

“I’m really crazy about gingerbread,” he says. “I go down a rabbit hole and suddenly two days have passed.”

Leilani Marie Labong is a San Francisco-based freelance writer. Email: food@sfchronicle.com

Build your own gingerbread ski lodge workshops with Chef Anthony Strong. 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. December 7, 14, and 21 at Prairie, 3431 19th St., San Francisco. 415-483-1112 or http://prairiesf.com/about/. Reservations required. $ 150 for a house, two people.

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“People go to the hotel and are not sure where the gingerbread smell is coming from. Then they see the castle and think that there is no way to be a real gingerbread house. Then they walk up to it and they see it and you they touch it and they smell it and then they realize it’s real, “said Emma Curtis, Culinary and Employee Dining Manager at Fairmont San Francisco.

To build the house, the Fairmont chefs have to bake 8,000 gingerbread bricks plus 3,500 pounds of icing and nearly a ton of candy. Then it’s up to the Fairmont painter Larry Walton to put it together.

It’s his handicrafts that bring Santa’s workshop, mechanical elves, Santa’s legs stepping out of the chimney and the train that goes around a miniature snow village to life. That year he even created a moving cable car that circled Lombard Street.

“When I go somewhere I want to see something magical. And one of the things I try to create is a magical effect. It’s a wow factor,” said Walton.

But an edible gingerbread house is too much for hungry guests. Take a close look at the two-story building and you can see where visitors peeled off gummy bears or Christmas tree marshmallows and even pieces of gingerbread.

The staff tries to replenish as much of the missing candy as possible to keep the magic alive throughout the holiday season.

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