With time to spare at McMurdo, while we continue to await our WAIS Divide flights, we are actively looking for things to do.
Rachel caught wind of a Gingerbread House Competition taking place in the Galley on Sunday, and decided to enter. She asked me if I'd like to join her team, and, since I have never actually built a gingerbread house before (she said buying a pre-built house and sticking gummy candies to it with frosting didn't count), I accepted.
We arrived at the back room of the Galley at 1pm, where we there were already multiple teams assembled and working. We were told we had until 4pm before the judging would begin. Teams would be judged based on their creativity, spirit, and design, with an extra point awarded if the entire structure was edible.
We were given a tray of gingerbread, one cafeteria tray upon which our final entry had to sit, and our pick of frosting, food coloring, candy decorations, and anything else we could scrounge up from the cafeteria.
After a quick team huddle, we decided to create an all-edible Ivan, the Terra Bus. Ivan is the bus that transports us all to and from the airfield, so it is well known around here.
I figured it would be structurally simple – Ivan is pretty big and boxy – and easy to decorate in a simple frosting palate of red and white. I was wondering how we'd get the spirit points, since there was nothing particularly Christmassy about it, but was hoping having a McMurdo-themed entry would make up for that.
With help from Jeffrey, who ran and printed out pictures of Ivan for our reference, we set to work. Rachel measured and cut the sides to form the structure of the bus, while I mixed red frosting.
Before long, we were ready for assembly, although Rachel was worried because the gingerbread was still quite cakey, and the frosting wouldn't have time to set in the allotted time frame. She asked me to find something to support the bottom. Since we had agreed to go for the extra all-edible point, I found some brownies from the cooler, cut them in quarters, and made five stacks – for each corner and the middle. We set the bottom of Ivan on top of that and began to build, "gluing" the sides together with white frosting.
Without time for the frosting to set, our sides were a little bit prone to falling over, so Rachel used a couple of brownies inside to prop them up, temporarily. As she started adding on more of Ivan's sides, she decided that we'd have to leave the brownies inside. I began laying a few brownies for each side of the bus, being careful not to fill more than halfway, so they would not show through the windows that Rachel was cutting. However, she said she wanted something to support the roof and asked me to fill all the way up. She had a different plan for the windows.
She went about melting lollipops in the microwave, and created stained glass-ish windows for the sides of the bus, while instructing me to fill the back windows with green and red candies.
After adding the top, we were ready to decorate. Luckily the red frosting I mixed turned out to be the right shade. We carefully spread red on top and white on the bottom, as required for Ivan, added Rocky Road cookies for tires.
Our full structure had to fit on a blue cafeteria tray, which we spread with frosting to look like snow. I added cookie crumbs and created tire tracks with a fork. Tiffany showed up around this time and began making penguins for additional decoration. Rachel showed me how to use hot water to give our frosting a smooth sheen. Things were coming along well.
With about half an hour to spare, as we were putting the finishing touches on Ivan, we started to notice that the whole bus was leaning to the right. I hoped it would survive until the judges came, but Rachel thought we should prop it up with more support from the bottom. Tiffany started to cut up brownies, and Rachel slid them under the bus while I held it up. Rachel accidentally stuck her finger in the frosting, and was worried that we'd need to fix it.
Little did we know, however, that the smudged frosting would be the least of our problems. At 3:53pm, a mere seven minutes before judging, the front of our bus fell off, followed by the right side, leading to the eventual collapse of the entire structure.
Funnily enough, as soon as this happened, a member of another team offered to give us NSF stickers to put on our wreck of a bus. Considering we had been stuck in McMurdo without transportation to the WAIS Divide field camp for so long, I found this to be an apt statement, in jest.
Not surprisingly, we did not win the competition. Although many agreed that the most impressive entry was an LC-130 on a gingerbread base, the winner was a quaint little gingerbread cottage with a Tootsie Roll chimney and mint-chocolate chip trees.
Here are some of the other entries.
Despite our crushing, last-minute defeat, I had a lot of fun making my first ever gingerbread 'house' from scratch. It is now prominently displayed in the cafeteria on top of the dessert bar, along with all of the other entries, as a reminder of the fun we had as well as our current transportation-less situation.
Did you make a gingerbread house this season? If so, post a picture of it on our expedition Facebook page (www.facebook.com/VelvetIceExpedition), and join the fun!
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