Jessyka and Keven Brunk are perfectly matched — both as a couple and as creators of fantasy gingerbread marvels.
“Jessyka went to school for painting and art, and so she’s always been very involved with that,” says Keven in this week’s Enterprise podcast.
Keven went to Syracuse University for mechanical engineering so he designs their gingerbread creations, starting with building half-scale models.
The two of them grew up in Guilderland, both students at Altamont Elementary School, with Keven a year ahead of Jessyka.
But it wasn’t until they were seated at the same table for a friend’s wedding reception in 2013 that they truly saw each other.
The first year they were dating, when Christmastime came, Keven suggested they make a gingerbread house.
Even when he was little, Jessyka says of her husband, he would “do a whole blueprint pattern” for a gingerbread house. “I never had the patience for the structural part,” she said. “I just wanted to decorate it.”
That first year, they made a barn complete with barnyard animals.
Every year since, they have made a new gingerbread creation, each more elaborate than the one before. They base their projects on important events that occurred in their lives that year — a sort of tribute to their growing relationship.
One of their largest creations was of the Brooklyn Bridge — the place where Keven, who was living in Brooklyn at the time, proposed to Jessyka.
“He chose the coldest day of that winter possible, and I was like, why are we going for a walk right now?” Jessyka recalled.
It was Valentine’s Day weekend, Keven recalled — a beautiful day, cold and maybe five degrees outside but crystal clear.
“One of the excuses he had was that, well, there will be less people on it because it’s so cold,” said Jessyka. “It was true. There was one other person.”
The massive gingerbread replica that the couple built of the bridge was four feet wide and two feet tall. Building the bridge was a learning experience, the Brunks said — some near disasters caused them to change their gingerbread recipe midway through the project.
Molasses, they found, made the gingerbread too soft to hold the shape of a bridge so they switched to corn syrup.
As the years have gone by, the complexity of their creations has increased. They now make all of their own pieces rather than incorporating store-bought candies as they had when trimming the Brooklyn Bridge.
Each creation takes hundreds of hours. The couple starts working on their annual project in October to be ready for the Christmas season.
Gingerbread has long been associated with Christmas. One legend, based on an 8th-Century Greek document, has a fourth wise man setting out to bring ginger to the newborn Jesus Christ. While the three wisemen from the east arrived in Bethlehem with their gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the fourth became ill in a Syrian city, giving his chest of ginger roots to a rabbi who had cared for him.
The Hebrew Bet Leḥem means “House of Bread,” and the Syrian rabbi would have his students make houses of bread in hopes of their saviour being born in Bethlehem. The waylaid fourth wiseman, the legend goes, thought of adding ginger to the bread.
Gingerbread was baked throughout Medieval times and Keven Brunk recalls tales of molds for gingerbread houses made of gold.
The Brunks have become friends with other gingerbread-makers as they compete each year at the Mohonk Mountain House, which is in New Paltz about 45 minutes from where the Brunks now live in Hopewell Junction in Dutchess County.
“It’s always amazing to see what the other competitors have done and it’s nice because it’s a really nice friendly competition,” said Jessyka.
The Brunks first entered the competition in 2017 and won first prize for viewers’ choice. They had vacationed that year at Acadia National Park in Maine and loved the Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse there.
The Brunks created a picture-perfect lighthouse tower and keeper’s dwelling but the most stunning part of the depiction is the craggy, rocky base on which the confection perches. Christmas trees are interspersed among the outcropping.
Other creations have included a Victorian scene of carolers — each with a distinct expression — and the characters from Charles Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” traveling in a period steamboat, cut away so that Scrooge is visible in an upper compartment.
This year’s creation is called The Winne-Bear-Go, a word play on the Winnebago camper. The Brunks love puns.
“This year, we went to Yellowstone National Park with Keven’s parents,” said Jessyka, explaining how they were intrigued with the unique campers people had at the park.
So then the Brunks envisioned how Santa and Mrs. Claus would go on vacation after Christmas — with a small cabin on top of a polar bear.
Their creation portrays Santa fly-fishing, in a steam made of beet sugar. Mrs. Claus plays Frisbee with Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer as Jack Frost relaxes in a hot tub on the cabin roof.
Tall pine trees form the backdrop. Jessyka made the pine branches — of gum paste with frosting as the needles — and then Keven and her father spent an entire Saturday assembling the trees.
The Brunks will make a ceremony out of destroying their creation. Early on, they had left one of their gingerbread houses — far too old to eat — in the woods for deer and other animals but family dogs found it and ate it instead, becoming ill from the sugar.
“My dad thought that it should go down in ceremony after all the work we put into it,” said Jessyka. “So we shoot it with BB guns or air rifles.”
“We invite people over to come look at it …,” said Keven. “Our friends bring their kids —
“And we allow the kids to touch it,” said Jessyka.
The Brunks have this advice for others who might want to make a gingerbread house:
“It’s not that hard to come up with your own little patterns instead of buying the one out of the box,” said Keven.
“Even if you do get the one out of the box, you should at least make your own icing,” said Jessyka.
They both agree that following your own ideas is the most fun.
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If you’d like to see Jessyka and Keven Brunk’s Winne-Bear-Go creation and the other gingerbread houses in the Hudson Valley Gingerbread Competition, they are online at https://bit.ly/3s4Yhy9.
Voting runs till Dec. 24 and the winners will be announced on Dec. 28.
— Melissa Hale-Spencer
Credit: Source link
