Courtland High School German Club Wins Two Honors at National Gingerbread House Competition
The team won in the teen category, as well as for their overall use of color.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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The Courtland High School German Club submitted perhaps its most ambitious entry yet into this year’s National Gingerbread House Competition—a 24-inch-tall replica in gingerbread, gum paste, fondant, and sugar art of the Kuchlbauer Tower in Abensburg, Germany.
And their ambition paid off. For the ninth time, the team won first place, out of about 42 entries, in the Teen category, and they also won overall “Best Use of Color.”
“And that was among all the entries, so they beat the adults when it came to the colors,” said Bettina Hoeninger, German teacher and German Club sponsor at Spotsylvania’s Courtland High. “They used very vibrant colors and we have many golden elements, which isn’t easy to do when it has to be edible.”
The tower that inspired the students’ entry is a 112-foot tall observation tower, which opened to visitors in 2010, on grounds of the Kuchlbauer brewery. It’s located in lower Bavaria, about an hour away from Courtland’s German sister high school. Students from the two schools regularly do exchange programs, and some of the students on this year’s Gingerbread Team had visited the tower over the summer.
“We loved it from the very moment we saw it, so this is what they did,” Hoeninger said.
The students spent three months completing their pastry interpretation of the tower, which they called “Mosaic Stairway in Ginger.”
“As soon as school started this year, they started drawing and thinking about how this,” Hoeninger said. “It has to be transported to Asheville [North Carolina] for the contest, so it had to be sturdy enough. The tower had to have some kind of support. It took them a month to figure out how this can be done.”
Luckily, the structure survived the drive to the Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville,h which has hosted the competition since 1992.
“Nothing came down and nothing collapsed, so we were very lucky this year,” Hoeningner said. “It is not always like that, especially if there is a hard stop or a big hole in the road.”
The tower will remain on display at the Omni Grove Park Inn through January 4, where it can be viewed after 6 p.m. on Sunday or anytime Monday through Thursday by guests not staying at the hotel.
Since 2013, the hotel has donated the proceeds from parking rates charged to view the gingerbread displays to nonprofits in Western North Carolina, which last year was devastated by Hurricane Helene. The storm also caused the cancellation of the 2024 National Gingerbread Competition, so organizers were “overjoyed” to be able to bring it back this year.
Hoeninger said her students are already talking about what they can do next year to top their gingerbread tower.
“This one will be hard to follow,” she said with a laugh.
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