Gingerbread houses have taken over the display case at the White Salmon Valley Community Library. The houses are an annual display made by local White Salmon resident Tricia Dunn. Each year the designs of the houses change. This year a sultan’s palace was added to the rotation of icing clad baked-goods. Swing by the White Salmon Valley Community Library to take a peek and absorb this sugary wonderland.
Gingerbread houses have taken over the display case at the White Salmon Valley Community Library. The houses are an annual display made by local White Salmon resident Tricia Dunn. Each year the designs of the houses change. This year a sultan’s palace was added to the rotation of icing clad baked-goods. Swing by the White Salmon Valley Community Library to take a peek and absorb this sugary wonderland.
Royal icing, gingerbreads, fondant, food coloring, almond slivers, sprinkles, and various types of candy, are what Tricia Dunn uses to create the elaborate gingerbread arrangements exhibited in White Salmon Valley Community Library’s display case.
Tricia Dunn, a local resident and longtime member of the White Salmon community, has been making gingerbread displays since 2007 for the White Salmon Valley Community Library, where she has been employed for 14 years. This year’s display is now installed and available to view during the library’s operating hours.
A few of the current gingerbread displays feature a sultan’s palace with a fondant camel and pretzel palm trees, a church with almond slivers for shingles, a two story home with butterscotch windows, and a traditional gingerbread house with a gum-drop path and candy-cane fence.
“We use all sorts of different things,” explained Tricia’s daughter Nicole Dunn. “We do roughly about the same amount of houses every year.”
“They are all edible, like that one house on the top, that was 28 pieces for a single house,” said Dunn. The planning for the gingerbread houses begins in August for Tricia and takes about a month of baking and prepping in order to have them ready for display by early December.
“She [Tricia] builds file-folder replicas of all of them and then uses that as a template,” explained Nicole Dunn. “She has to bake each piece — anywhere from three to five times — in order to dry them out.”
“She does all the baking, and all the designs and everything, and my grandma and I, we help her with the little things,” Dunn said. She and her grandmother Judy Walker pitch in when they can but Tricia runs the show.
“We were working on these probably for about three solid weeks, of building the houses themselves, and then mom works on them for about a week, maybe two weeks, before with the baking and the patterns and everything,” said Dunn. “It takes probably about a month to do all of them, and we start working on them during the first week of November. But they are all completely edible.”
Tricia has always been into baking and is very crafty according to Nicole Dunn. “The first year we started doing it there wasn’t anything in the case for the month of December, and so she wanted to put gingerbread houses in there, and then all the kids enjoyed them so she kept making them.”
The gingerbread houses have been well received at the library and often draw praise from viewers. Despite not knowing Tricia directly, spectators often ask librarians when the gingerbread display will be installed and if the creator would conduct a class.
To make the stained glass windows Dunn explained her mother’s process of crushing candy lifesavers, laying the bits into patterns, and then melting them to look like stained glass. The houses are held together with icing and candy canes, which are placed in the interior corners of the houses to provide structural support.
“And then we destroy them at the end. It’s funny because when you throw those things [the gingerbread houses] on the ground in a bag, they bounce. They don’t actually break because they’re so solid,” said Dunn.
Dunn’s gingerbread houses will be on display until the beginning of January. Stop by the library to absorb their sweet charm, and if you get close enough to the display glass you can smell the sweet spiciness of baked goods on the other side.
Commented