NATCHEZ — Hether Petersen was a ball of nerves held together by royal icing last week.

Petersen, the pastry chef at The Castle Restaurant and Pub at Dunleith Plantation, worked the most part of last week away from her regular kitchen and in a side room of the restaurant assembling a gingerbread house that will be on display at The Castle during the Christmas season.

The house is a replica of The Castle, but decked out in holiday cheer with candies and salt dough figures. Petersen has sculpted the oversized cookie castle for four years.

“I say every year after it is done I’m not going to do it again,” she said. “But each year as the time comes around to start, I get excited and start asking ‘Can I do it now? Can I start yet?’”

The gingerbread creation is officially unveiled at Dunleith’s annual Christmas brunch, which is today.

Petersen said she can easily spend 40 hours working on the creation, and that is if everything goes right.

The preparing, building and decorating processes spans four long days for Petersen. Day one consists of preparing the gingerbread dough which has to rest over night before she can roll it out, cut it and bake it on day two.

Petersen said the best homemade gingerbread houses should be made with dough that is rested so that when it bakes it is sturdy.

Petersen uses a sugarless gingerbread dough.

“You’re not going to eat it anyway so there’s no reason to use sugar,” she said. “Plus I think (omitting sugar) makes the dough less moist and more sturdy.”

Day three is the most stressful day, Petersen said. That is the day when the actual assembly takes place.

It is stressful for a couple of reasons — the main one being that assembly requires patience and that, Petersen said, is a virtue she was not blessed with.

The different pieces of gingerbread must be carefully “glued” together with royal icing and then left to dry. Petersen said rushing that step could be disasterous for the entire structure.

“I have to just walk away from it,” Petersen said. “When it is drying, I get impatient and want to touch it and do something to it, but you can’t, so I just walk away.”

Royal icing, a mixture of powder sugar, water and meringue, dries hard, but it takes about an hour and a half to dry.

“The first year I was doing it, I was having a hard time sitting still and leaving it alone,” Petersen said. “My boss brought me a hair dryer to hurry up the drying.

“It worked, and I use it every year now.”

Petersen said the hairdryer should be used only on the low setting.

“(The day I put it together) is the most stressful day,” Petersen said. “I usually keep the door closed because it can get kind of tense in here.”

But once the walls are up and together, the tension is gone and the fun begins.

Day four, baring any unexpected tragedies the night before, is when the real fun begins. Day four is decorating day, Petersen said.

“I easily spend $50 on candy just for decorating,” she said. “I wish I could have done that when I was a child, just go in and buy all the candy you want.”

Petersen uses salt dough, a dough made of salt, flour and water, to make snowmen, Santa and his sleigh, animals and even a moon that decorate the lawn around The Castle.

Santa’s reindeer, all nine of them, are made from pecans collected on the grounds of Dunleith.

“The entire board will be covered,” she said. “I’ll color coconut green for grass and the house will be covered in snow.”

But decorating can only start if the house is still in one piece. Last year, decorating was put on hold after part of the roof collapsed.

“I came in and all the reindeer and Santa were inside the house,” Petersen said. “I had to walk away for a minute before I could put it back together.

“You get attached to it after putting all those hours into it.”

Even last year with an 11 hour catastrophe, Petersen was able to reconstruct the house and have it ready for the annual Christmas brunch with Santa.

And this year, two walls in the main house broke during assembly.

“A few walls broke, but I always make extras because something is always going to break,” Petersen said. “I’ll probably be here all night.”

Despite the stress involved, Petersen said putting the house together is one thing — fun.

“Christmas is my favorite time of the year,” she said. “I love it, and I love doing this house. There are always critics who say ‘this isn’t straight’ or ‘I could do it better,’ but it isn’t supposed to be perfect.

“It’s fine if it is a little crooked, because it supposed to be fun.”