While having lunch at Cabanas just after boarding the Fantasy, we saw Gingerbread House Making listed on the Personal Navigator.  The event was free, but you needed to reserve a spot for your family.  After lunch, we stopped down to the Guest Services desk to reserve a spot.  There were a few times offered.  I do not know which one we originally picked, as it was eventually moved to the morning of our Costa Maya day.

The Gingerbread House Making was held in Animator’s Palate, and hosted by the Executive Pastry Chef and his assistant.

The tables were covered in plastic wrap for obvious reasons. We were given a gold foil cake plate, gingerbread bricks, candies, and a huge pastry bag full of sugar icing!  The gingerbread, as well as the candy were from a kit, but the icing was homemade.

Throughout the build, the chefs would walk around and check on our individual progress.  We choose to make use of the entire bag of sugar icing!

Seriously, when you give me a full bag of icing, I’m going to use it.  Since the gingerbread was from a kit, I knew the only chance we had is if we covered it in frosting.

The combination of frosting and Caribbean humidity softened up the  gingerbread and by the end of the cruise the house was picked apart to the foundation.

Disney Fantasy Gingerbread House

On the port side of the atrium lobby on the [Disney_Fantasy], sits a gingerbread house that took the construction and culinary teams over a week to develop and build. The ship’s carpenters built the framework for the house over the course of 5 days in their shop. It took them half day to dismantle the house, and a day to relocate and assemble the structure in the lobby. While the carpenters were busy with the framework, the culinary team was hard a work making 650 pounds of gingerbread dough. The gingerbread house is made up of 5200 gingerbread bricks with about 1500 used on the roof alone. To get it all to stick together, 220 pounds of icing sugar were used as mortar.

Mickey and Minnie sit on top of presents on each side of the doorway.

Don’t forget to leave a plate of cookies out for Santa before you go to bed tonight!