The Gingerbread Architect

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.

Mr. Lovitch went about the project the way Willy Wonka might have, if the fictional candymaker were trying to make ends meet in high-rent New York City.

He began the project in early February, working mostly after midnight while his wife slept.

“My wife likes the fact that I work on it at home and I’m not out gambling or drinking,” said Mr. Lovitch, who baked one little house at a time and kept each piece in an empty bedroom with card tables set up for multilevel storage.

He recently began driving the pieces to the Hall of Science, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, from his apartment on the Grand Concourse near Yankee Stadium.

The exhibit opened last weekend, but it is still a work in progress for Mr. Lovitch, who on Sunday was mixing his gingerbread ingredients — flour, brown sugar, Crisco and corn syrup — in a modest mixing bowl and heating up his shortening in a tiny sauce pan. As usual, he used his modest stovetop range and a conventional convection oven that handles one baking pan at a time.

Food colorings and spices like ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg, were kept on a set of shelves he had installed.

Mr. Lovitch whipped up some white icing — powdered sugar, egg whites and cream of tartar — and added it to several gallons he kept in a big plastic bucket. He also made a green batch to touch up the trees, with their branches of piped green icing.

“It’s kind of like living in Santa’s workshop,” said his mother, Vickie Lovitch, who was visiting from their native Kansas City, Mo., and staying in the apartment. She added that her son’s obsession with Christmas extravagance dates to boyhood, when he would string up 10,000 Christmas lights outside the house.

Mr. Lovitch prepared a few sugary trees for transport, pasting their bases onto baking pans with sticky icing.

“This stuff is not hard to make, but it’s sure hard to move,” he said, holding the pans in his lap while his mother drove a rental car to the Hall of Science, where the growing village sits on a plywood deck with a footprint the size of a spacious two-car garage. It will be disassembled after the holiday season, and Mr. Lovitch will give pieces away to visitors.

The village, which includes an ice rink, a firehouse and the “Cinnamon and Nutmeg” railroad station, is next to learning kiosks devoted to molecular chemistry.

“Hey, baking is Chemistry 101,” Mr. Lovitch said. “You have to mix your egg whites and sugar and cream of tartar. If you can’t understand that, you don’t have icing.”

Mr. Lovitch said his obsession with gingerbread villages began after he failed to win a competition in Kansas City as a teenager.

As his chef jobs took him to Washington, D.C., and then to Pittsburgh, he made bigger and bigger holiday villages each year. In January, he moved to New York to get better exposure for the creations, with a goal of making a living solely off making, and teaching, gingerbread construction.

“Being a chef, people may remember my meals for a day or two, but with the gingerbread, I can get thousands of people at a time checking out my work,” he said. “I’ve gotten emails a year later, thanking me for it.”

Mr. Lovitch said he paid for his villages himself — shelling out “a few grand” this year.

“I save money on ingredients by shopping when I’m out of town,” he said. “I look for rural grocery stores and just clean them out, of their flour or candy or sugar or whatever.”

Mr. Lovitch is making a second village this winter, at the Marriott. It is three stories high, with 75 structures, and he is making it in the hotel’s spacious kitchen.

“You could park a Greyhound bus in that place,” he said. “I can bake 20 pans at once.”

At the Hall of Science last week, Mr. Lovitch carefully expanded the house, installing additional trees and paving more areas with M&Ms. He kicked off his chef clogs and sat cross-legged while squeezing icing onto the display, spreading it with a butter knife and applying more candy decorations. The effect was not lost on those for whom it was intended.

“It’s Candyland,” one child yelled, peering at the village.

“Think of the cavities you’d get, eating all that,” marveled another.

As Mr. Lovitch worked, his mother opened box after box of candy, keeping him in supply.

“He’s sort of like a gingerbread Santa Claus,” she said, looking at her son in his Santa hat.

“People ask me why I do this masochistic hobby, that is insanely laborious and a huge amount of work,” he said, pointing at the crowds of excited children. “Well, that’s why.”

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