Reporters couldn’t stop asking White House Pastry Chef Bill Yosses if holiday visitors take bites out of the gingerbread and white chocolate replica of the South Portico.
He confessed that in his three years of helping craft the traditional White House gingerbread house he sometimes sees little nibbles taken out of it.
But once he explained the process – letting more than 100 pounds of overcooked, crunchy gingerbread go stale, and making sure to dust the house in the weeks it sits in the State Dining Room – everyone realized it was better as a decoration than as a snack.
After First Lady Michelle Obama announced the theme of this year’s White House Christmas, Yosses laid out in great detail for reporters how he made the home, from hand carving the white chocolate steps to shrinking a computer printout of Abraham Lincoln for the photo on the wall in the dollhouse-sized state dining room replica.
Yosses and his team spent six weeks crafting and designing the gingerbread house, which has new additions this year with a new First Family at the helm.
He described it as a “pet project of the whole house.”
This year the team opened up the White House with a “shadow box” type window to show dark chocolate furniture, and added a little Bo Obama made out of marzipan and the White House Kitchen Garden.
The garden includes soil made from chocolate cake and the vegetables crafted with the help of local schoolchildren out of marzipan. It was included because “it’s a huge part of our life,” Yosses said.
It weighs nearly 400 pounds in total and is moved to the White House Visitors Center after the holiday.
Late Update: View our White House photos here and check out the video Yosses recorded explaining the process.
