Gingerbread Spectacular baker/designer/architect Rimar Reed’s entries have long been part of the much anticipated event held at the Opera House. For this year’s 19th show she decided to challenge herself by creating an interactive game gingerbread, Candy Drop. To her delight and surprise, judges Alyssa Allen, Wendy Bellows, Margaret Branch and Pandy Dickinson selected it for the Best Holiday Spirit award.

When she’s not working at Bigelow, Rimar makes greeting cards and loves to make those of the interactive variety. So, why not go for an interactive gingerbread? Most of us would think there were enough potential issues involved in successfully taking a gingerbread creation to fruition without the whole interactive bit. For starters, and many of us can relate to this, she’s not very good at math and she isn’t an engineer.

Fortunately for all of us, these gingerbread baker/construction artists are a determined lot. I remember while I was initially checking it out at the show if Rimar used modeling clay to create the successful passage of the mini-jawbreakers. How did she do it? I wasn’t successful at peeking down the chimney where the colorful candy was dropped.

She said it was trial and error, for sure. Rimar used edible markers to keep track of each attempt at angling a “bridge” from point a to point b.

“It was really funny. Every time I figured out a solution, a new problem came up,” she said. “When I glued the bridge onto the second floor I didn't account for the glue that attached the bridge to the gingerbread wall. Oh, geez, yeah. So that was another problem. I watched a video online of a person using melted sugar, burnt sugar, instead of using very thick frosting or icing as the glue. I tried it and thought, ‘I’m never doing that again.’ What happened was when I had glued the bridge to the wall, I didn't account for the bubbling of the melted sugar and the candy would get stuck.”

At this point her husband suggested a dremel might be the way to go. “And I was like, what? I’m not a carpenter! But it’s a small tool with a rotary thing on the top that sands stuff down.”

Thanks to that dremel, Rimar was able to smooth the walls down allowing the rather sizeable candy to move through to its final destination.

Rimar began working on Candy Drop in early November beginning with baking the gingerbread. She wanted to attend Kevin Kiley’s gingerbread baking/construction class at the Opera House held in mid-November, but just kept forgetting about it – until the day after.

But it wasn’t until the week before the entry had to be brought to the Opera House that the building intensified. “I was working on it, a lot. I’d get home from work, do my thing – eat, shower and everything – and then work on my gingerbread house sometimes until one or two in the morning. You know, I think next year I really have to go to Kevin's workshop, because I think this would save me a lot of hassles.”

Back to that building: Working with her second batch of gingerbread, she cut out the buiding pieces, but come construction time, Rimar discovered she had somehow miscounted.

“So when it was time to glue everything together, I was missing a piece,” Rimar continued. “I must have counted one twice, but luckily enough I had saved some extra pieces. So on one of the walls I used two different pieces and it worked just fine. I figured, since it was going to be attached to the first floor, no one was going to see the inside of it anyway.”

Rimar, a Hawaiian native, had never built a gingerbread structure before moving here 15 years ago, not that is, until she went to the Gingerbread Spectacular. And now it would appear she’s hooked. So, what is it about building these gingerbread creations, interactive or otherwise, that jazzes her so?

“OK, truthfully, I guess I'm catching up on my childhood, maybe? I knew what gingerbread houses were, but I never thought I’d be making them. Maybe it's another avenue of an artsy thing. Yeah, I did it once and told myself I was never gonna do it again, but I keep doing it. I actually do love the process – setting my intention, what my vision is ... .and then what it actually comes out to be.”

She recalled one entry that differed from her vision. "The gingerbread house that I found online was very elaborately decorated. If I remember correctly, the entire house was covered in royal icing, but it was kind of lacy-like and I thought, uh huh, there's no way I can do that. So I did it the best I could and included a picture of how it was supposed to look. I think the cards I added (to go with) said ‘This is my vision ... and this is reality.’”

Certainly, in the case of Candy Drop, Rimar Reed fused her vision into reality in the form of one sweet interactive game.