Jessyka and Keven Brunk build their air castles of gingerbread

Jessyka and Keven Brunk are perfectly matched — both as a couple and as creators of fantasy gingerbread marvels.

“Jessyka went to school for painting and art, and so she’s always been very involved with that,” says Keven in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Keven went to Syracuse University for mechanical engineering so he designs their gingerbread creations, starting with building half-scale models.

The two of them grew up in Guilderland, both students at Altamont Elementary School, with Keven a year ahead of Jessyka.

As the years have gone by, the complexity of their creations has increased. They now make all of their own pieces rather than incorporating store-bought candies as they had when trimming the Brooklyn Bridge.

Each creation takes hundreds of hours. The couple starts working on their annual project in October to be ready for the Christmas season.

Gingerbread has long been associated with Christmas. One legend, based on an 8th-Century Greek document, has a fourth wise man setting out to bring ginger to the newborn Jesus Christ. While the three wisemen from the east arrived in Bethlehem with their gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the fourth became ill in a Syrian city, giving his chest of ginger roots to a rabbi who had cared for him.

The Hebrew Bet Leḥem means “House of Bread,” and the Syrian rabbi would have his students make houses of bread in hopes of their saviour being born in Bethlehem. The waylaid fourth wiseman, the legend goes, thought of adding ginger to the bread.

The Brunks will make a ceremony out of destroying their creation. Early on, they had left one of their gingerbread houses — far too old to eat — in the woods for deer and other animals but family dogs found it and ate it instead, becoming ill from the sugar.

“My dad thought that it should go down in ceremony after all the work we put into it,” said Jessyka. “So we shoot it with BB guns or air rifles.”

“We invite people over to come look at it ...,” said Keven. “Our friends bring their kids —

 “And we allow the kids to touch it,” said Jessyka.

The Brunks have this advice for others who might want to make a gingerbread house:

“It’s not that hard to come up with your own little patterns instead of buying the one out of the box,” said Keven.

“Even if you do get the one out of the box, you should at least make your own icing,” said Jessyka.

They both agree that following your own ideas is the most fun.

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If you’d like to see Jessyka and Keven Brunk’s Winne-Bear-Go creation and the other gingerbread houses in the Hudson Valley Gingerbread Competition, they are online at https://bit.ly/3s4Yhy9.

Voting runs till Dec. 24 and the winners will be announced on Dec. 28.

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