Inside The New York Botanical Garden
gingerbread adventures
Posted in Photography on December 14 2010, by Plant Talk
A little afternoon “Eye Candy” for you. It snowed overnight in New York City, and we all woke up to a winter wonderland.
There’s nothing that gets us in the holiday spirit quite like a pretty little snowfall (especially one that doesn’t stick around too long, turning into gray mush).
So if you come for a visit today (the Garden is open until 6 p.m. after all!) wear a nice, warm pair of boots.
And remember the Holiday Train Show and Gingerbread Adventures are both inside!
Posted in Photography on December 3 2010, by Plant Talk
Okay, so not really a mutant butterfly. But here at The New York Botanical Garden, even the ”topiary” in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden are getting into the holiday spirit! So don’t forget to enjoy a little fresh winter air when you visit the amazing gingerbread houses at the Gingerbread Adventures.
Butterfly (photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen)
Posted in Exhibitions, Holiday Train Show, Programs and Events on December 4 2009, by Plant Talk
’Tis the Season to Be…Gingery!
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Noelle V. Dor is Museum Education Intern in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden. |
The holiday season is here, and the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden has cooked up a celebration of sugar, spice, and everything nice with its annual Gingerbread Adventures. While mostly everyone is familiar with the story of the Gingerbread Man and has seen (if not decorated and eaten) gingerbread cookies, many may not know the botanical and historical background of this favorite winter treat. I certainly didn’t.
As an intern in the Children’s Adventure Garden, not only do I get to work behind the scenes of this wildly popular program, I also get to join in on the adventure! Believe it or not, my previous experience with gingerbread was limited to enjoying the follies of Gingy, the gingerbread cookie character in the movie Shrek, and to helping create the “Gingerbread City” scene for a Candyland-themed high school play.
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Posted in Exhibitions, Holiday Train Show on January 6 2009, by Plant Talk
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Gingerbread Adventures in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden includes a display of detailed and fragrant gingerbread creations by renowned pastry chefs in and around New York. Here Leslie Randazzo, co-owner with her husband, Mark Randazzo, of Mark Joseph Cakes, describes how they conceptualized and executed their design.
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Although Mark and I had never worked with gingerbread before, we were so enthusiastic about making our gingerbread debut in The New York Botanical Garden’s annual holiday exhibit. Yes, Mark is a pastry chef, but he specializes in custom cakes, so this was quite different.
This year’s theme, “Gingerbread People at Work and at Play,” left us wondering “What do gingerbread people do?” I called my nephew, Harry, whose immediate response was, “the same things we do.” Aha! Brilliant! With our target audience being kids, we thought about careers revered by children. It was my sister who suggested firemen. Then we were on a roll. Mark and I share a love for New York City’s pre-war architecture, so there was no question that we’d model our main structure after an old FDNY house. Through research, Mark found one in Manhattan on Lafayette Street that is stunning.
Our next order of business was a crash course in gingerbread structures, namely, keeping them up. For this, Mark made an icing that was similar in consistency to cement. We cut the gingerbread dough into the dimensions that were already carefully calculated. These large pieces make up the main structure. Then we cut gingerbread dough into equally sized rectangles. These were used as a second layer, to achieve the stones the building is made of. Laying the “stones” was extremely time consuming, because the firehouse had so many dimensions and different shapes to work around and each “stone” had to be trimmed to fit precisely in the appropriate space. The windows were made using a sculptor’s molding material that we melted and poured into the gingerbread’s square openings. As it dried, it solidified beautifully. To light the inside, we used LED Christmas lights that we clipped short. For the roof, we thought the perfect candy would be bite-sized black licorice that we would line up to look like shingles. Unfortunately, after placing on more than half of the licorice we discovered that the oily coating used to keep the pieces from sticking together in the package were also keeping them from sticking to the icing. The solution was Nilla® wafers. We were concerned that they wouldn’t cut easily with a knife, but they worked quite well.
Once the main structure was completed, we began adding the details. Red Twizzlers® were used for each window frame, and icing was piped on to create the appearance of snow. The fire truck was decorated using a sugar dough called “gum paste.” Then we designed the wintry fun that one notices when examining the display closely such as the snowball fight and the boy making a snow angel as the firemen look on.
This entire experience was so rewarding; it felt like a tremendous accomplishment after a total of 70 hours of labor. It was great fun and well worth the effort.
Posted in Programs and Events on December 5 2008, by Plant Talk
The Imagination Behind Its New Look
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Kevin Peterson, Assistant Manager of the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden, is responsible for the design and fabrication of exhibits in the Children’s Garden. |
We had a great time creating the new decor for Gingerbread Adventures in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden. We had wanted to do something a little different for its seventh season. I sat down with Jim Storm, senior museum technician, to brainstorm about the project, and we began to develop some initial ideas. Next, I did some preliminary sketches of a gingerbread town on a roll of vellum. Those series of drawings were the launching pad for the new look. As we started building, our concepts continued to evolve, we continued to collaborate, and Gingerbread Town took on a life of its own.
One aspect of our design was to have the gingerbread people look like they were occasionally popping out of the wall and existing in “our” space as well as having their own adventure. As it became a 3D reality, some things had to be reworked from the drawings because of the limitations of the physical space. The timeline was also very challenging: We started in early August and just kept plowing away at it until we installed it the week before Thanksgiving.
We completed the city scene first and then moved onto the country and farm scenes. Next came the gingerbread couple ice-skating under a cookie moon. But maybe I should stop there so I don’t give it all away. Jim and I were able to add pigment to caulk so we could “frost” the gingerbread people and make other objects look like big cookies. It was quite successful in that the gingerbread people and their world really do look good enough to eat. We wanted to have kids feel as if they walked into a fun-filled fantasy world and to light up their eyes and to spur their imaginations. We wanted a world that made them feel good. One little boy who visited made sure he said goodbye to all his gingerbread friends before he left the Adventure Garden. That was pretty nice.
Gingerbread Town in Gingerbread Adventures is made from plywood, papier-mâché, and paint, and most importantly, a lot of imagination. Albert Einstein said “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” And I think that’s especially true with this undertaking, which was an adventure in itself. It started with just a few drawings and the belief that we could really transform the Discovery Center for the holiday season. Hopefully, everyone will enjoy their Gingerbread!
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