Chef Cooks Up His Own Construction Project

The entire village of Summitville, U.S.A., all 140 square feet of it, has been put on a truck and taken to Porterville in Central California, in order to arrive in time for Christmas in a children’s hospital there.

The little community of six buildings, including a church, a lake, a bridge, streetlights and a population of 34, only weighs a fraction more than half a ton, but that’s pretty much when you find out it’s built mostly of gingerbread.

Last week it was gracing a portion of the Summit Restaurant, in San Clemente, where the chef, Bill McColl, used 1,338 eggs, 180 pounds of flour, more than 23,000 jelly beans and 704 lollypops, to say nothing of many pounds of sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and lots of other ingredients, to create the village.

“It took me 300 hours, and it’s modeled after the times of Ebenezer Scrooge,” McColl said. “Restaurant customers sort of sponsored the whole thing by donating money for such things as the little doll people, or ‘buying’ a whole house.

“Of course, they can’t actually have the houses, but donors have streets named for them and things like that.”

McColl, who lives in Dana Point, is 34 years old.

“I’ve been in the cooking business, starting in Rhode Island, since I was 12, and after I came to California I started thinking every Christmastime that I’d like to make something like this, but I kept putting it off until three years ago,” he said.

“I was working at the Brickyard Restaurant in Orange, and I made one little gingerbread house. Last year, when I was at Luciana’s Restaurant in Dana Point, I made an old-fashioned train, with four cars and a locomotive with a big smokestack. It was 15 feet long. The Capistrano Bay Recreation District has it now.

“Why do I do these things? I do it for two reasons. One is for little kids--I have two little boys of my own--and the village is going to that children’s hospital; and the other reason is for the community awards. Last year, my train won a special award from the Dana Point Chamber of Commerce. I’m hoping for something from the San Clemente Chamber this year for the village.”

McColl already has plans for next year.

“It’ll be Cape Canaveral, in honor of the astronauts. It’ll be three times as big as the village,” he said.

For a purist, or someone with an extraordinary sweet tooth, there’s one drawback to McColl’s works.

“They’re pretty much made of plywood, with the gingerbread and icing and candy put on like stucco,” he said.

“You can’t eat them, but they last about five years.”

Herbert J. Vida is on vacation.