Smitty (World's Largest Gingerbread Man Monument)

In December 2006 a small Texas town baked a gingerbread man that weighed 1,308 pounds 8 ounces and stood 20 feet tall, and the frame it was baked on now sits inside a monument. The Smithville Area Chamber of Commerce says an event organiser proposed the cookie in 2005, and the gingerbread man was already a symbol of the town’s Festival of Lights. The cookie used 750 pounds of flour, 49 gallons of molasses and 72 dozen eggs and was baked over a dump-truck load of charcoal. Texas Highways reports that the oven was built from cinder blocks and the cookie sheet was welded by Lower Colorado River Authority workers.

The cookie was baked on 2 December 2006, the day of the 16th Festival of Lights. To qualify for Guinness World Records it had to be stood up by crane; the chamber says 65 degrees, Texas Highways says 45. Texas Highways adds that the previous record was a 14-foot-11-inch, 400-pound cookie baked in Rochester, Minnesota, in February 2006. Guinness recognised Smithville’s cookie in 2008, according to the chamber. The record lasted until 9 November 2009, when an IKEA store in Oslo, Norway, baked a 1,435-pound cookie, Texas Highways says.