By Madelynne Kislovsky
RED BANK – The pastry chef at Molly Pitcher Inn is good with a spatula, but she also knows a little something about baking with a hammer and saw. Melissa De Araujo, 29, of Sayreville, uses traditional carpentry tools to craft the 28 x 16 gingerbread house replica of the Molly Pitcher Inn.
Although she had never made a gingerbread house until five years ago, De Araujo (pronounced “Dee Arujo”) credits a lot of her creativity and knowledge about confectionary housebuilding to her family. She became familiar with tools and gained a general knowledge of handiwork from working with her father, a maintenance manager, electrician, and handyman. De Araujo would help him with tiling and landscaping jobs around her home in South Amboy since she was 10 years old.
Her mother taught her an appreciation for detail, and to not be afraid to experiment. “Artists don’t make mistakes,” she would say.
The chef and her siblings would craft wreaths and Halloween costumes with her mother, who was employed as a seamstress. When De Araujo looks at the massive gingerbread house in the elegant lobby of the Molly Pitcher Inn, she sees the talents of her parents, and things they taught her are reflected in her whimsical work.
De Araujo baked giant sheets of gingerbread, hardening them by adding copious amounts of honey into the recipe (calling it “gingerbread plywood”), cut out spaces for the windows and doors while the dough was still hot from the oven, and shaped the slabs to imitate the 19th-century Federal-style hotel. She then used an orbital sander, originally intended for wood, to smooth and level out the cookie sheets. She used saws to cut the gingerbread to the perfect shape, and hammers to tap the walls and floors just so, aligning them into place. “There’s almost more maintenance tools than culinary tools involved when you’re making something like this,” De Araujo said. “While most people are afraid to grab an orbital sander to sand a cookie instead of just making it again, I’m sitting there like, I need a sander and a saw and a hammer and I’ll be fine, that’s it, I’ll figure it out.”
The Inn is so impressive to guests, De Araujo said, because, “I think it makes adults feel like little kids. It’s almost like believing in Santa. It makes you feel like a child – there’s gingerbread and candy and they used to do this with their mothers. Everybody makes them and they all look the same, so when you see one that’s different, it’s like…Merry Christmas.”
The gingerbread house is made with 30 pounds of powdered sugar, 22 pounds of white chocolate and five pounds of honey. The pathway is 575 Red Hots (simply laying them took six hours), and the grass is composed of 44 ounces of green sprinkles, to name a few ingredients. The base that holds the house, the patio, the pool, and the marina is 33 x 36 inches. The chef even included a perfectly accurate candy American flag, with 50 stars, beginning and ending with the correctly colored red stripes.
The project took nearly a month of daily work in a conference room. Construction began on Halloween and was complete the day before Thanksgiving, clocking a whopping 246 hours on the sugary sculpture. De Araujo’s only company during that time came from her boyfriend, Bruno, who brought her hot meals from Boston Market. Her twin sister, Maribel Araujo-Almeida, came to offer a helping hand and control the radio, which she says was the only thing she was allowed to touch.
“Anytime I see one of her houses I get all wide-eyed and just start playing pretend in my head. It’s magic,” said Maribel, who sometimes tried unsuccessfully to sneak a few bites of candy while Melissa was hard at work. Araujo-Almeida had previously pursued a career in art and has experience in painting and sculpting. “I can’t believe that someone can decide to make a gingerbread house, put all that effort into constructing the masterpiece in 21 days, have it on display for 30, and then probably throw it out. Mind-blowing. Then again, I guess that is a job of a chef! An end product with no shelf life,” she said.
Back before RiverCenter’s 12 Days of Christmas promotion, businesses in the Red Bank area crafted extravagant and unique gingerbread houses and displayed them in their windows. It was a way to get people to visit stores in the holiday season.
Even though the contest has ended, De Araujo continues the annual tradition of recreating The Molly Pitcher. She enjoyed the reaction from guests who encountered the model in the lobby and took photos with it.
“It’s a learning process, ‘cause every year I do it, but every year I do it different,” she said. “And it gets better each time.” This year, De Araujo was able to try new techniques and rely on her kitchen team to handle the day-to-day work while she focused on the gingerbread house. But her project is about more than replacing the usual marshmallow wallpaper with white chocolate, and trying out fruit rollup for the floors instead of icing. “This time, I was just doing it for us,” she said.
The replica is held together with royal icing (egg whites, a surprising amount of powdered sugar, and a little bit of water). The house features a patio made of Necco wafers, white chocolate railings, windows that required 37 pounds of isomalt (a substance similar to sugar but is able to withstand humid air for long periods of time), and a roof made of Andes chocolates.
To create the brick structure, De Araujo created a stencil out of clay and cut each individual brick by hand with an X-Acto knife (the completed model required four knives and 20 blades, all of which are covered in royal icing). This alone took seven hours. The pastry chef then sprayed the cookie with a red cocoa powder to give the appearance of brick.
A few parts of the model were perfected by accident, and some were added as a last-minute fix. The snow (which took six hours) was used to hide a few crooked chocolates, but ended up being the perfect addition to the creation. Once the snow started melting and dripping, De Araujo feared disaster, but to her surprise, the look added a realistic feel that she couldn’t have achieved any other way. Some boisterous guests enjoyed a few bites of this royal icing snow one night during their stay, to the dismay of De Araujo. “They just don’t understand how long it takes,” she said.
De Araujo experiences her favorite part of constructing the house when she comes back to the Inn after forgetting her coffee mug or car keys, sometimes seeing a small group of people crowded around the mass of cookie and frosting, pointing and taking pictures. “I love it. I kinda like taking off my chef jacket and sitting in one of the chairs nearby and listening to everyone’s comments. Criticism isn’t something that bothers me,” De Araujo said.
De Araujo said 10-15 hours of her 246 were spent shopping for the items she needed to create the model. The recreation of the Molly Pitcher cost the Inn about $200, the three strings of 16 lights along the roof and in the miniature lanterns cost $70 alone.
De Araujo went to culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, and at the time, pastry wasn’t quite her forte. She focused on learning how to bake correctly to have a well-rounded skill set. De Araujo started as a line cook for the Molly Pitcher, but after a tasting of her pastry work, she became the pastry chef and eventually the chief gingerbread house maker.
