Artist ices competition with sweet creations

WASILLA — Laurie Ethridge said she was excited when she got the sugar candy fire in her gingerbread house just right this year.

Dancing, clapping and hopping up and down to demonstrate how she reacted, Ethridge said, “I was like, yeah! I’m a gingerbread genius!”

This year in Wasilla her gingerbread house, done up like a two-story dollhouse with mice asleep upstairs and fireplace downstairs, took first place in the city’s gingerbread house competition. This would be Ethridge’s third year in a row taking home the gold in Wasilla.

In Palmer — where her entry to fit the city’s Grinch-themed Colony Christmas celebration included the Grinch in a Santa suit and a sleigh full of stolen presents — she won first this year and two years ago. In between, her husband took top honors and she won second place.

She described her thought process for the Grinch project thusly: “OK, he’s got to be stealing something. How is he going to get away? Tractor or a big four-wheeler.”

She went with tractor, and on the roof she put a snowman tied down like a trophy buck.

These days, at holiday time her craft takes up most of the available space in her house. She’s got candy pieces laid out on the bed in her guest room and her kitchen, even after she picked up half the mess, is a wreck.

“My house has been a disaster for four weeks. My husband is such a trooper,” she said.

Other evidence of his status as a trooper — Ethridge said she’s been known to borrow his power tools to cut pieces of gingerbread down to size.

But the activity has become a family affair. In addition to that first-place her husband earned, Ethridge said her 6-year-old son has started to think in terms of gingerbread, a fact she illustrated with a story about one day when he picked up a Rice Krispies treat.

“He says, ‘Mom, we can make a shelf out of this,’” she recalled.

The windows in this year’s Wasilla entry were made with a special baking pan. Ethridge said she saw it advertised on television.

“I said I have to get that for my gingerbread house. That’s going to make some wicked windows,” she said.

But that didn’t mean they were easy. Ethridge said they took a couple of tries to get in and she had to make special molds to get them the right shape. Once they were molded she had to shave them down to fit the hole. Frosting, she said, fixes most of her booboos and for the windows it let her get away with a window smaller than the hole it was to fit.

“One needed a little more icing, the other needed more shaving,” Ethridge said.

Gingerbread also isn’t the easiest medium to work in. It doesn’t behave like wood. It’ll bend and warp and needs some special attention if it’s going to stand on its own.

So to have this kind of dedication, a person’s got to really like to bake, right?

Nope.

“I was kind of into art and painting, that kind of stuff in high school,” Ethridge said. “I don’t like to bake.”

What she likes, it seems, is to see her creations take shape.

When she starts, she said, “I don’t ever really know how they’re going to turn out.”

Ethridge said that it was the reactions she got at that first Wasilla competition that really got her interested in the hobby.

“I stood on and watched people come by and they all said such nice things,” she said.

She also likes competition, even if it’s only with herself. When she thinks of next year, she said, she starts wondering how she’s going to top this year’s. In the Valley, competing against herself is all she’s really got.

“I know people who are just as talented, but they’re not entering,” she said.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what she does with her entries afterward, Ethridge said she doesn’t eat them. By the time they’re finished and she’s ready to get rid of them they’re too hard and stale to be tasty treats. Plus, to get gingerbread that stands on its own you have to go with the kind that really doesn’t taste all that great.

Her entry two years ago, she said, she and her friends detonated with fireworks on New Years. And last year?

“I threw it in the woods and almost cried,” she said. “I was like, here you go ravens!”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.