From front drive to front doors: GM engineer builds huge, elaborate gingerbread houses

Donna Rorabaugh loves to solve problems and build things.

As an advanced vehicle industrial engineer at General Motors, Rorabaugh helps the automaker create the production processes in its factories. A few years ago, when the automaker was launching the all-electric GMC Hummer pickup at Factor Zero in Detroit and Hamtramck, Michigan, for example, Rorabaugh designed the process used to assemble the front-drive unit on that vehicle.

In her free time, Rorabaugh is still engineering and building − but not cars. She makes gingerbread houses. We are talking huge, elaborate monuments of sugar (they can hold 30 pounds or more), spice, flour, chocolate, candy and more. Some of her creations stand 4 feet tall and have electric lighting. They typically cost less than $100 in ingredients but take up to 75 hours to build.

Rorabaugh is famous in the gingerbread community, having won or placed high in 19 major competitions held all over the country − where the rule for all competitions is everything in a gingerbread creation must be edible. That demands creative engineering and other solutions for some of her designs.

Rorabaugh has competed on the Food Network twice, and her gingerbread houses have been on display at the GM Global Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. She has come in fourth place twice in the National Gingerbread Competition and first place in other notable contests such as in the Pastry Chef category, Christmas at Mustard Seed Hill in Kentucky; in the advanced category, CookieCon in Kentucky; and in the Achatz Gingerbread House Challenge in Troy, Michigan, to list a few.

For Rorabaugh, 58, building a gingerbread house is similar to building the assembly line process for a car.

"With industrial engineering, we look at everything and say, 'What do we need to be able to build this?’ “ said Rorabaugh, who holds a degree in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. "I would never say gingerbread is very productive, but I’ve been able to use some of my (engineering) techniques. Like when you get to the Food Network challenge: What can I do to speed up this build? You only have so much time on TV. Can I get the windows printed up on edible clear paper? Can I get grids painted on the windows so I don’t have to do all that work? How can I speed everything up to get more onto the TV show?”

Making the first gingerbread house

Rorabaugh is from Pittsburgh but now lives in Rochester Hills. She has worked on and off for GM for the past 30 years, she said. She took an interest in gingerbread houses as a girl, often begging her mother to make one. Her mother would make cookies and bread but never a gingerbread house, which was "intimidating" and "a little too much for her," Rorabaugh said.

So one day, at about age 13, Rorabaugh found "Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys & Girls" in the local library. It had a recipe for how to make a gingerbread house, and Rorabaugh decided, "I’m going to do it myself."

Her first house was a simple ski chalet style. But her father, who worked for Westinghouse Electric Corp., challenged her to "take it up notch" by putting a light inside it. He took her to a cake decorating store where the staff explained how to use the tools. The next year, her gingerbread house had a light in it and more decorations, and "it just started to grow from there," she said.

"Everybody would come over to our house for a big German New Year’s dinner, and I would have to have a house for that. Every year you had to do something bigger, better and new. You’d see all the (gingerbread houses) in these magazines back then. You'd look at them and say, “Can I do that?”

She got so good at gingerbread houses that by 19, Rorabaugh started looking to enter contests. She did several small-town competitions, but when she heard about the National Gingerbread House Competition in Asheville, North Carolina, that became her goal. 

"I wanted to make a house good enough that I could take it to nationals."

Good enough to compete and make 'Good Morning America'

The National Gingerbread House Competition usually draws a couple of hundred competitors each year to the Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville, Michigan. The event was canceled this year, and the hotel is closed because of the severe damage to the area from Hurricane Helene last month.

Rorabaugh said the National Gingerbread House Competition actually is international, with competitors from Canada, Mexico and South America.

Rorabaugh believed she had a house good enough for national competition in 2004. She created her "Four Seasons House," which had the same front on all four sides, but it was a different season and holiday on each side. She entered but did not win. It was good enough to be a backup gingerbread house for possible showing on "Good Morning America," except it didn't make the show either.

Undeterred, Rorabaugh returned the next year and this time placed fourth with a castle that had a dragon on it. That one did make it on "Good Morning America." The year after that, she placed fourth again with a snow globe of Detroit.

"I had little factories around the base," Rorabaugh said. "It was really cool, too, because I had some help. The zoo has that water tower with the wrap around it that is so iconic. I was trying to figure out where that wrap was, where I could find it. So I contacted the Detroit Zoo. I didn’t hear anything for a few weeks. Then they wrote back and said, 'We re-created it for you, and here’s the graphic for it.’ ”

She printed the graphic onto edible paper and wrapped that around her gingerbread water tower. She also got some help from a GM colleague.

"I was complaining about how I want to put a tire in there," Rorabaugh said, explaining that all the tires she found to make the mold were made of rubber, which would not work for her edible mold.

"How in the world do you find a tire that’s not made of rubber?" Rorabaugh said. “I was talking about it at work." One of her co-workers mentioned his grill's plastic tires, which inspired her. "So I made a big chocolate tire for my snow globe of Detroit.”

Bourbon distilling in gingerbread

Rorabaugh estimates she has made 80 to 100 gingerbread houses since she was 13. Each one usually lasts for two to three years unless her family or dog eats them, she said. When it comes time to disassemble one, she will save some parts to use on future houses.

"I may overengineer the houses. For the past two years, at the Tech Center, I’ve displayed one so people could see it because not everyone knows I make gingerbread houses. People think, 'Yeah, yeah, right, little gingerbread houses.' I’m like: ‘No, no. Big, extravagant, gingerbread houses.' They have no idea what goes into them."

One of her more elaborate ones, which has been on display at the GM Tech Center since last year, was made for the Mustard Seed Hill Gingerbread House Competition in Millersburg, Kentucky, in 2022. Rorabaugh plans to enter that competition again this year, on Dec. 6, she said.

Whenever Rorabaugh enters a competition, she researches what has already been entered, what has ranked well, and what kind of competition there might be. When she entered the Mustard Seed Hill contest in 2022, her research showed her the competition was in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Inspiration struck!

"I started researching the bourbon process. As I’m doing that ... I see this vat and I said, 'That almost looks like a Christmas ornament. If I took a Christmas ornament and I turned it upside down, that would look just like that vat,' " Rorabaugh said. "I can make a mold of Christmas ornaments, I can bake my gingerbread in it, and it can be a gingerbread of the bourbon process.”

She used sugar to mold bottles of bourbon, and she made smaller houses on the sides where the bourbon workers would live.

"Bourbon has to age in barrels. Well I could put in a hill, carve out the inside and put barrels underneath it for aging," Rorabaugh said. "So you bring the local interest in there and do a whole town. And I don’t have very much time because I’m working full time, so I thought, 'How can I speed this up?'"

She made layouts on paper of the shapes she would need for the creation and tapped a friend to make 3D cookie cutters of them so she would not have to cut the shapes by hand. Her gingerbread Bourbon Town won the competition.

Victoria Benson, president of Mustard Seed Hill, which puts on the competition, told the Detroit Free Press, part of the Paste BN Network, that Rorabaugh's design that year was "masterfully created and incredibly intricate."

"Her creativity is out of this world," Benson said. "Her piece in 2022 was a bourbon distillery (perfect for Kentucky) and was a showstopper. Beyond being a phenomenal gingerbread house artist, Donna is extremely kind and embodies that spirit of Christmas."

Fighting for first place on the Food Network

Beyond the competitions, Rorabaugh has appeared on the Food Network's Gingerbread Showdown in 2019 and in 2022. In 2019 she did a Halloween competition, and in 2022 she joined a Christmas challenge. She came in second place in both and is eager to return to try to grab the top prize.

“It’s really outside of what I do," Rorabaugh said. "I usually let my product speak for itself. But you’re the person on there doing the challenge, and it’s entertainment, so you have to remember that part of it. So it’s not just you sitting there and working on it. You have to be talking, entertaining and interacting. It was a real challenge.”

She baked the pieces ahead of time and shipped them to the show, which is live.

"They start the clock and you start building. It’s probably the first time, too, that we see our pieces since we packed them to travel. "You open everything up to see if they made it or not. You had to figure out how do you pack these delicate gingerbread and sugar pieces and hope they make it. You’re sitting there, ready to start and unwrapping it, you’re thinking, 'Is it cracked?' "

All of her pieces made it intact. But had they been broken, her edible "glue" would have been hot sugar. The problem is the sugar must be heated to 150 degrees to work quickly as a sealant, Rorabaugh said. That means it could result in a second-degree burn if the baker gets it on their hands.

Finding her calling

Rorabaugh said gingerbread offers the technical challenge of problem-solving while giving her an artistic and creative outlet. It occupies her mind day and night, she said.

"If I was traveling and I’m sitting at the airport, I’m designing a gingerbread house in mind. I’m putting it together. I’m thinking of all the problems," Rorabaugh said. "Quite often too, I’ll lay it out in CAD − computer-aided design − ahead of time so that I can do some of the work integrating the layout and print out the pieces for each of the patterns. I make up cardboard models to check the dimensions and then you use those pieces to actually cut your pieces of gingerbread.”

She tests things first, too. One time she had made sugar towers to serve as supports and wondered how much weight they could hold. Rorabaugh headed to the gym, grabbed some hand weights and started putting them on top of the sugar supports, slowly adding weight. When she got to 30 pounds, "it was getting hard to hold the sugar and the weights. So it’s amazing what they can support."

Rorabaugh also keeps learning as she keeps competing, noting that she builds relationships with competitors.

"There’s one lady who’s extremely good in Canada," Rorabaugh said. "I was just up there last month to spend a weekend. A couple of us got together to talk gingerbread and share techniques and learn new things.”

And, yes, Rorabaugh does eat some of her creations if they are a short-turn design, but she acknowledges it is often hard to take them apart after all the work that went into creating them. But the tastiest one, she said, is her castle with the chocolate cliffs around it supported by Rice Krispies Treats.

Besides competing, Rorabaugh donates one or two gingerbread houses to charity each year to be sold or auctioned. This year she'll donate one to the Festival of Trees in Dearborn, Michigan, to benefit the Children's Hospital of Michigan Foundation.

Rorabaugh believes her love of making gingerbread houses led to her calling as an engineer.

"All these things I did as a kid and what I liked about gingerbread ... I wonder, was that just an inclination toward engineering early on? The process and the design, is that what led me into engineering?

"I never thought about it being interwoven or connected, but as you look at it you say, 'Yeah maybe it is.' There really is a tie between the two."

Contact Jamie L. LaReau: jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan.