World's largest gingerbread village at Hall of Science

From the NY Times:

To call it a village would seem to diminish its Lilliputian sprawl, seeing as how it encompasses 164 structures and weighs in at slightly more than 1.5 tons, including a stuporous 2,240 pounds of icing.

Clearly this is no ordinary gingerbread village.

It is, in fact, the world’s largest such creation, built piece by piece by Jon Lovitch in a closet-size kitchen in his South Bronx apartment — a monument to the idea of working big on a tiny scale.

The exhibit, “Gingerbread Lane,” is on display at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. The Guinness Book of World Records last week declared it the world’s largest entirely edible gingerbread exhibit.

If the Guinness people saw how he made it, they might have declared it the world’s craziest project.

Mr. Lovitch, a 37-year-old chef, did all of the cooking and culinary construction work at home before assembling the village at the Hall of Science. Besides the icing, the village also includes 400 pounds of candy and 500 pounds of gingerbread dough.

All of the pieces — from the brownstones, to the two-foot-high nutcrackers made of many layers of royal icing — were made by Mr. Lovitch, usually late at night after returning from work as the executive sous chef at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge.