Now on display at the Four Winds Casinos in New Buffalo and South Bend are the crowd-pleasing Christmas gingerbread villages.
Four Winds Executive Chef Brandon Smithson tells us they’ve been putting up the gingerbread displays each holiday season since 2007, and they always generate positive comments.
It’s a lot of work to construct the villages. Smithson says both the facilities and pastry teams are involved.
“Facilities helps us build the displays, like the underlying displays of it, so they can hold it all,” Smithson said. “Then the Pastry team gets in there and gets their hands going with several different techniques that we put into this.”
Baked into the displays are more than 900 pounds of gingerbread, 600 pounds of icing, 30 pounds of chocolate, and a variety of candies. Smithson says they usually follow a theme, but he let the teams guide themselves this year.
“This year we did something a little different. We let the Pastry team kind of get creative and bring their own ideas in there, and it really was neat to watch them in action. They were able to have all these little diverse decorations.”
That’s why, for example, there’s a Bluey house included in the South Bend village.
Smithson says the teams start work on the gingerbread villages around mid-October, and they’re placed in the rotunda of the casinos with the start of December. While the displays are technically edible, he doesn’t recommend trying to eat them.
The villages will remain up through Christmas.
