Ashley Knipp, left, and Emily Wooten display their winning gingerbread house.
Seniors Emily Wooten and Ashley Knipp are the winners of this year’s gingerbread house competition in the culinary arts department of Mansfield Senior High School.
Faculty and staff voted for their favorite among several entries by junior and senior students.
Wooten and Knipp created a pastry model of the house featured in the 2009 Disney animated movie “Up,” in which an elderly man and a boy soar high in a house suspended by thousands of balloons.
There was a tie for second place between the traditional gingerbread house of junior Stephanie Wallace and the “crazy trees house” created by juniors Equwan Jefferson, Lamont Lindsay an Drevon Wilson.
Third place was awarded to the junior trio of Sha’Tia Porter, Jamie Sparks and Anne Wrobleski for their “Nighmare Before Christmas House.”
The gingerbread house competition has been a December tradition al Senior High for several years.
Chef Linda Golden, the culinary arts instructor, has explained previously that students design their themes and make their own patterns. They bake the gingerbread, assemble their structures and decorate them with pounds of candy, pretzels, sugars, coconut and paints.
The “glue” that holds the houses together is a royal icing of egg whites, powdered sugar and lemon juice, Golden said.