Houston baker makes thousands of gingerbread houses for holidays

HOUSTON - Once Halloween is over, attention will quickly shift to the holidays, but a small Houston bakery is already there. They've been busy, for months, building a holiday tradition for families.

At Roland's Swiss Pastry and Bakery, near Memorial City, the staff is busy every day creating baked delights for hotels and others who order them. But, as the year winds to a close, there's an added attraction to the workload. "I say we have a full-time job and gingerbread is our hobby," laughs Elvira Schaefer. She and her husband, Gerhard, bought the bakery more than 30 years ago and built upon a holiday tradition from their native Germany, making gingerbread houses.

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Lots of gingerbread houses, from Gerhard's personal recipe. "We don't cut any corners. People say, 'Can you make it any cheaper?' (and) we say 'No, this is what we do'," he says, "If you want something different, you need to go somewhere else. We stick to our recipe, and our tradition of how we do the gingerbread."

As a commercial and wholesale bakery, Roland supplies gingerbread houses for area grocery stores and organizations, making about eight thousand of them every year. It starts with a dough, made with a unique set of spices and up to 60% honey, that ferments for more than a week. Then it's rolled out into sheets; cut into shapes, for the houses; baked; then assembled, one by one, by hand.

Once finished and packaged, they'll go off to grocery stores and organizations, with a decoration kit, where people can have a lot of fun, being festive. Sooner, or later, someone will bite into one and Gerhard Schaefer says that's where his old-world recipe really shines. "It's very, very enjoyable when people see something different, that they've never had before and say, ‘Oh, this is different’," he says.

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As you might imagine, making thousands of gingerbread houses, months in advance, can be cumbersome. Every extra space in the bakery is stacked with boxed houses, ready for delivery. But once the holidays are here, and all the houses are gone, Roland's will take a break from gingerbread. "Even though we work very hard during the Christmas season or holiday season, it's fun to do," says Elvira, "And then, at the end of the year, we go ‘We did it again.’"

And then they'll get ready to do it, again, next year.