Four Seasons pastry chef shares gingerbread house secrets

Vegas Voices is a weekly question-and-answer series featuring notable Las Vegans.

Four Seasons executive pastry chef Jean-Luc Daul has become legendary among the hotel's frequent visitors and guests for the elaborate gingerbread house villages he constructs each Christmas season.

This year's village, which Daul estimates took 200 to 250 man-hours to construct, went up on Thanksgiving Day and will remain near the hotel's grand staircase, across from Press coffee house, until Dec. 26.

We spoke last week with Daul — a native of the Alsace region of eastern France who came to the United States in 1999 — about the theme for this year's village, how he got started making gingerbread houses and what are some of his construction and decorating secrets.

Review-Journal: What did you do for this year's village?

Jean-Luc Daul: We're actually working on it right now, trying to put all the pieces together. It's going to be a mystical little village, the holidays in wonderland. Everything is crooked or lopsided — out of the norm — with a big building on top of a hill and 10 smaller ones coming down the hill. It's kind of a ski-slope setting.

RJ: How long have you been making gingerbread buildings?

Daul: Oh, my gosh. In this hotel it has been 15 years. Before that pretty much everywhere I've worked; I would guess 25, 30 years. It just kind of varied depending on where I was. I did some in Europe and Asia. I used to work for Walt Disney World in Florida and did a couple there. It's kind of the same all over — the feel, the theme; what we're going for in the snowy look is the same. Even in tropical countries I've gone for that look. People just relate to Christmas as being cold and snowy, being pine tree-ish looking. The main theme is always identical, and then it's geographical to where I am; I just pull in a little of what's around me.

RJ: Who seems most interested in the villages?

Daul: Usually from my experience, what is the neatest part of this is that if adults walk by and don't pay attention, kids get drawn to it. And if kids pay attention, adults get drawn to it. It's mystical, unreality, it kind of takes people out of their day and kinds of puts them in a different place for a few minutes.

RJ: How did you first get into making gingerbread houses?

Daul: When I did my apprenticeship, we made gingerbread houses for sale, in the retail section. When I entered the hotels, we didn't sell them any more, but I figured why not keep the tradition, just put them up in kind of Alpine scenery.

RJ: Why do you do it?

Daul: Every time a kid stops in front of a village for a few minutes, that's the payoff. There's a lot of people who have never been in snow in their life. I think it kind of puts them in that place without being there. I think that's the magical part of it.

RJ: What is the most unusual gingerbread structure you have built?

Daul: When I was in Singapore, I turned the entrance of the restaurant into a gingerbread house, so when people walked into the restaurant to go to the hostess stand, they had to literally walk through a gingerbread house. I needed the help of the carpenter and the engineering department for the structure, because food alone wouldn't hold it. It was probably 9 to 10 feet tall.

RJ: Along those lines, do you have any secrets to share regarding construction and/or stability?

Daul: Just draw it on paper first. If it's something that's going to be kind of tall or has odd shapes to it, buy a piece of foam board at the craft store, hot-glue it together and use that as your foundation and put your food on top of that. That way you won't get frustrated if things collapse or things fall over, and that way it'll last for a very long time. If you like the way it looks before you put the food on it, you already have a good start.

RJ: How about decorating secrets?

Daul: I personally think you should keep it to three colors; it's going to look a lot nicer and be a lot easier to execute. The other secret is really just make it your own, have fun with it. If somebody is really into whatever hobby they have, if somebody likes to fish, make a fishing cabin. If somebody's into cars, make a car garage. Make it the way you would want to move into. All of the guys in the pastry shop here, that's how they look at it when they make houses.

RJ: Is there anything in gingerbread you'd like to attempt but haven't yet?

Daul: I always wanted to make like a German cuckoo clock, with the birds popping out in the front. One of my dreams is to build an entire village of German cuckoo clocks but have them all suspended in the air. That's something I always wanted to do — and have that cuckoo clock background sound. The house where I grew up is just an hour and a half away from the Black Forest in Germany, where cuckoo clocks kind of originated.

RJ: Are you sad to take it down every year?

Daul: It's a little sad. There's so much excitement and so much fun to put it up. When it's down, it signifies to me the end of the holiday season. It's bittersweet.

Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at hrinella@reviewjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter: @HKRinella