Meet the Music Room Magic-Makers

You’re in for a sweet treat this A Longwood Christmas. We have transformed our elegant Music Room into a lavish peppermint palace ready to host a formal ball … and we’ve quite literally rolled out the red carpet for you. Inside, feast your eyes on fantastically dressed trees, including an 18-foot-tall stunner with red and white garland swirling up its trunk; larger-than-life nutcrackers guarding two lavish thrones; peppermint columns; and many more bold delights. You’ll also find a sumptuous dessert table, proudly adorned with faux cakes created by local high school culinary students, as well as a stunning gingerbread house façade created by local set designer Erica Harney, that leads you to a festive gingerbread servery—and makes you feel like you’re in another world. Here, we share how these spectacular works of art came to be, and the talented artists behind them. 

On our Music Room dessert table, we’re thrilled to share five peppermint-inspired faux cakes designed and created by teams of 16 high school students from the culinary program at Technical College High School Pennock’s Bridge in West Grove, PA. A public high school specializing in career and technical education for students in grades 10 to 12, TCHS is operated by the Chester County Intermediate Unit on behalf of Chester County’s 12 public school districts. From veterinary science to sports medicine, healthcare to graphic communications, and many more, all TCHS programs prepare students for success in college, the workplace, and life. 

TCHS culinary arts students gain hands-on experience in the kitchen and have the opportunity to run a restaurant that is open to the public, as well as prepare for catering events throughout the school year. For this project, the students worked in groups to create concepts for their cakes, which were reviewed by Longwood. Longwood supplied the cake forms, which were made using industrial foam sculpted into tiers and painted white. Students received the forms as blank canvases and were asked to make edible-looking cakes without using any actual edible materials. Students began working on their faux cakes in mid-September and completed them by the end of October.

“Pictures of the Music Room were used during the process for scale,” shares TCHS Culinary Arts Instructor Chef Daniel Dietrich. “We set up a mock display area to students could understand the distance and perspective from which the cakes would be viewed. This allowed them to visualize the details of their design and make sure it was proportionate to the room and cake.”

Students drew sketches of each cake, which served as blueprints along the way. As students worked with the non-edible materials, some designs had to change based on what materials were available or how they fit onto the cake tiers. “There was a lot of trial and error when creating the detailed designs of the cake, but the students worked well together and were satisfied with their results,” shares Dietrich. “We set up a digital fireplace and played Christmas music to help get the students into the spirit as they worked.”

For student Alan Navarro—who created two cakes along with fellow students Erick Ayllon and Dominic Davila—the most exciting part of the process was “sharing the beauty of the holidays. This was a great opportunity to work together, be creative, and have fun.” 

Student Braeden Tomasco, who looks forward to a career in hospitality and food management, reveled in the “creativity and freedom to create as we wanted,” while working on two cakes with fellow students Sofia Reyes and Andrew Park. The details proved challenging, as Reyes shares: “Figuring out how to make our icing three-dimensional was tough. But we worked together and figured out how to use spackle with white acrylic paint and crystals to help it stand out and shine.” 

Students Megan Greene, Reagan Stoltzfus, and Austin Edmunds followed their vision in creating a beautiful geode-effect cake with green “icing” and colorful details; their faux flowers represent the inside of the cake shining through. 

As one of their cakes, along with students Gabriel Fragale and Harold Felix-Tejada, Torres, Ochoa, and Rivera created a beautiful red and blue cake complete with a beautiful ombre effect, flowers, and snow. For Felix-Tejada, who aspires to be a personal chef, “the idea of seeing the cake on display and people enjoying it is so completely exciting.” For Dietrich, “this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the students and myself. Creating the display cakes was an act of storytelling. It’s about capturing the essence of the theme for the season and translating it into something people can enjoy visually and sensually. It’s a reminder of how food, even though the cakes are faux, art, and tradition intersect to create something memorable that goes beyond just the holiday itself.” 

Just beyond our dessert table is a deliciously wonderful, larger-than-life gingerbread house façade, spanning 16 feet in height and 10 feet in width. The gingerbread house base was built in-house by our team of carpenters, and it was expertly texturized, painted, and crafted by Erica Harney, a full-time studio artist, scenic painter, and muralist based in Lansdowne, PA, just outside of West Philadelphia. 

Harney has worked as a muralist and restoration artist in and around Philadelphia, as well as a scenic artist for theater, ballet, opera, television and film, museums, and more, sharing her talents with such organizations as Opera Philadelphia, Opera Delaware, the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, HBO’s Mare of Easttown, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines’ Icon of the Seas. She has studied at Alfred University, the Pennsylvania State University, and the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy, as well as served as artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center in Vermont; Weir Farm Art Center in Connecticut; ArtScape Gibraltar Point in Toronto; and the Palazzo Rinaldi Artists’ Residence in Italy. In addition to Harney’s larger-scale public projects, she also runs a full-time business creating commissioned paintings and watercolors based out of her home studio, available via Etsy. 

This serves as the first time she’s created artwork for a garden. “In my personal work, I gravitate towards representing landscape and architecture,” shares Harney. “In the work I create for public spaces, the focus is on the transformation of landscape and architecture. There’s a lot of cross-pollination between the two and I’m thrilled to be creating this work for Longwood.” 

For Harney, the process of transforming a huge lumber frame into a realistic gingerbread house by using “the magic of paint” was exhilarating. “The scale is larger-than-life,” she shares. “I want guests experiencing it to feel as if they’re truly in a gingerbread house and have almost shrunken in size as soon as they encounter it.” Harney did most of the creation and painting in Longwood’s paint shop, from first painting the brown gingerbread base of the façade frame to the embellishments of gumdrops, cordials, merengues, cookies, and other faux treats that adorn it. 

We brought the façade into the Music Room several times during the process, making adjustments along the way. After the façade was brought to the Music Room for installation, Harney put her final touches on the piece—including giant gumdrops Harney created to “serve as the landscape of the space” and further add to its larger-than-life experience. 

We are delighted to share with you these deliciously wonderful works of art, on view now in our Music Room.