Homes sweet homes

By David Maurer

Published: November 11, 2008

The moment the little girl spotted the gingerbread house her eyes opened wide with wonder.

Her mother said it was a gift from Santa Claus, which made perfect sense to the 3-year-old. In her mind, no mere mortal could have made something that looked so beautiful and smelled so good.

The child didn’t touch her breakfast and spent all morning near the end table on which the house was displayed. When lunchtime arrived, she again refused to eat.

“My father came home, and my mother told him I wouldn’t eat,” Johanna Shalloway said with a smile as she thought back to her childhood growing up in Silesia, which was then part of Germany.

“She said I wasn’t sick and didn’t have a temperature, but I wouldn’t eat. My father said he wanted me to eat ‘Now.’ When I started to cry he asked me why I didn’t eat.

“I told him I wasn’t eating because I wanted to shrink so I could live in the gingerbread house that Santa had brought. That’s my first memory of a gingerbread house.”

Shalloway said her mother always made a gingerbread house during the Christmas season. They were for eyes only until New Year’s Day, when they could start to be eaten.

Shalloway immigrated to the United States in 1950 and soon started her own family. She

continued the gingerbread house tradition, but then took it to levels her mother hadn’t imagined.

Recently Shalloway invited a visitor into the “Gingerbread Room” of her Charlottesville home. The first things that capture the eye are painstakingly detailed gingerbread houses displayed under glass and preserved for the ages by a coating of polyurethane.

“I made this house 20 years ago, and it’s the oldest one I have,” Shalloway said of the house, which was initially displayed in the front window of a shoe store. “This one here I made to look like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel.

“I’ve never made two houses alike; they’re always different. As you can see I use different types of candy to create the yard around the house and for decorations.”

As magnificent as Shalloway’s gingerbread houses are, they’re not what she has become best known for. That would be the gingerbread cookies she creates to resemble specific people and things such as antique automobiles and pop culture icons, such as Garfield and Mickey Mouse.

For more than 25 years Shalloway has been making customized gingerbread cookies for Christmas, birthdays and other special occasions. It started with a request from a woman to create a cookie with the likeness of her cousin, and Shalloway never looked back.

“I’ve only had one request for a cookie that I refused to do, and I can’t tell you what it was,” Shalloway said with a smile. “People will send me a photograph or even describe what they want over the telephone.

“I can make anything they want, and I put a lot of detail into it. I made a cookie of a country store that somebody wanted. I went to the library to find out exactly what a turn-of-the-century potbelly stove looked like.

“One time I had a mother and her two daughters come by to pick up their order. I was showing them my portfolio that has photographs of many of my cookies in it. When they saw this particular cookie they all got excited, because they recognized it as being their neighbor.”

Shalloway calls her business Portraits in Gingerbread, but said it isn’t exactly a business in the traditional sense. She said she creates the one-of-a-kind cookies for the enjoyment she derives from doing it and will accept a new job only if she has time.

The woman widely known as the Gingerbread Lady charges a straight fee of $10 an hour, which covers everything. A recent portrait of president-elect Barack Obama took her about two hours to make.

She creates her fine details and intricate lines with dental tools. She also has come up with innovations, such as using pasta shells shaped like flowers as miniature cookie cutters and a garlic press to make locks of hair.

Most people save the cookie portraits as keepsakes by covering each side with polyurethane. But, if they do decide to eat the cookie, they will find that it tastes as good as it smells.

Shalloway makes her gingerbread according to an old German recipe. She uses six natural spices, plenty of real ginger, artificial sweetener and no salt.

And there’s little chance that someone will ask for a cookie shape that the gingerbread artist can’t create. She has more than 1,600 cookie cutters in different shapes ranging from ballerinas to locomotives.

“You name it and I probably have it,” Shalloway said as she opened a closet in the Gingerbread Room that’s filled with metal and plastic cookie cutters. “This drawer here is all cookie cutters shaped like animals.

“This area has all the cutters connected to Christmas. I think my most unusual cookie cutter is this one in the shape of a Chinese letter. Put it this way and it means one thing, and this way it means something else.

“This big cookie cutter is used when you don’t want to cut out cookie after cookie. Just roll out the dough, press this down and you have 32 cookies.”

Shalloway said her busiest baking time is during the holidays. She will only take as many orders as she can comfortably fill, and she is already working on something special.

Having already created gingerbread cuckoo clocks, castles and trains, what will come out of the Gingerbread Lady’s oven next is anyone’s guess.

“I’m going to bake something for a lady in town who has my first name,” Shalloway hinted. “She is 101 years old, so I have to bake something special for her.

“Where she used to live was like a farm in Bavaria. There were fish in a pond and mountains in the background.

“I can make anything with gingerbread. All I will say for now is that it will be special.”

For cookie orders Shalloway can be reached at 296-9965.