Each year around Christmas, Diane Schenker makes an elaborate gingerbread house. Schenker's houses aren't anything like the pre-built boxed kinds people can pick up at Costco. They're intricate and detailed, and usually based on her own designs. Her sister Lorraine O'Neal insists the structures "rival any Martha Stewart creation."
In almost 30 years of building houses, she's made enough structures to fill a Christmas village, including a greenhouse with a hard candy roof, downtown Anchorage's Voyager Hotel and even her own Stuckagain Heights home with a giant black bear peeking through the window.
Some creations take days to build, others weeks. Schenker, who's retired from the state of Alaska, has no formal baking training. While the designs are complex, she said the whole process is just for fun.
"People assume I'm more fanatical than I am," she said.
This year, Schenker built a 2-foot-tall Eiffel Tower. It's a creation she's been considering for years, but was spurred to action following last month's terrorist attacks in Paris.
Schenker said she "cheated a bit" in making the tower, since she has a wire model replica she based the cookie creation on. Still, she made the template herself, a complicated endeavor because most of the pieces are not simple rectangles or squares seen in most gingerbread designs.
Schenker and her sister are both fans of "The Great British Bake Off" and its American spinoff -- shows about avid home bakers competing in complicated baking challenges. The American show recently featured a gingerbread competition where one contestant made an Eiffel Tower (Schenker had already made hers). O'Neal said that version was nice (judges were impressed), but her sister's was better.
"It did not really compare to Diane's," she said.
Schenker added a bit of her own artistic flair to the tower, including adding a cookie Christmas wreath, rose and violet hard candies she got from a trip to Paris years ago and sugar windows. Those windows are a signature part of Schenker's gingerbread structures. She said they aren't difficult to make and seem to elevate simple designs.
"It's just melted candy," she said. "You just pour it in to a hole. It's not that big of a deal, but it's very pleasing to people."
Schenker's love for gingerbread houses started in the 1980s. Then a corrections officer, she and several co-workers decided to make houses for fun. Schenker had never made one before, and her first ones were amateurish -- puffy walls, uneven corners and lots of candy canes. But she found herself enjoying the process so much that it became an annual tradition with her friends.
Now it's is more of a solo endeavor. Schenker makes them most years, and the goal is to create something sturdy that's technically edible (though probably not very delicious).
"You can eat it, but it's boring," she said.
Schenker tries to include personal touches in the houses. When she designed her own house with a bear peeking through the window, at the base she wrote "Got Sugar?" -- a nod to the fact that a bear broke in to her home that year and stole only a bag of brown sugar from the pantry.
While she takes a lot of pictures of the creations, she doesn't hang on to gingerbread houses themselves past the holidays. They just end up in the trash, she said, since there's no point in eating the stale creations that weren't built for taste in the first place.
"If I kept them I'd have to add an addition on the house," she said.