In order to challenge the Culinary II students to put their decorating skills to work, Chef Michael Hadobas hosted a gingerbread house decorating contest on December 2nd.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” Hadobas said. “I’ve never had the opportunity to do gingerbread house decorating with my students. I think it’s a fun exercise in teamwork and my students always ask for us to do more pastry-related [projects] and learn how to practice fine little detail work.”
Many students have incorporated strategies to stand out and be successful while ensuring that their design is stable.
“We first had a day where we planned out the schematics of the house,” sophomore Reilly McCullough said. “I actually used a 3D-modeling software, AutoCAD, to model out all of the dimensions and worked off there. We actually duplicated the house we made and then deconstructed it so we figured out all the pieces and shapes we would need, and we had them next to the finished model in the simulation. [So] once we got to the kitchen, we were able to cut and measure our pieces based on the measurements from our model.”
Teamwork is especially crucial because participating in this contest can decide what happens to everyone’s team next quarter.
“There’s a good incentive because it means next quarter we get to keep the groups we were in,” sophomore Ariana Bognot said. “Most people chose their groups for this quarter, and whoever gets first place gets to keep working with their friends.”
At the end, there was one team that won the “A” Day contest, keeping their team for the next quarter.
“My group ended up winning.” sophomore Valerie Hernandez. “We decided to make our house a bit smaller and that probably contributed to our win. I didn’t learn many new things, but it was a fun experience.”
Even though only one came up on top, Hadobas still embraced the creativity that everyone brought to the table, showing off what skills they have to prove.
“I didn’t give them any specific themes to follow, but they’re limited on how much dough they have,” Hadobas said. “So whatever they’re creating, they have to be able to execute it out of their given recipe of gingerbread dough. I said you can use anything around the kitchens, but you’re also welcome to go out and buy your candy and buy your things to decorate with so that you’re not limited to what we have here.”
