World's Largest Gingerbread Village On Track to Break Its Own Record

— -- Toy commercials, lights and more are part of the growing reminders that the holidays are just around the corner.

Now you can add the world’s largest gingerbread village to the list.

Officially open as of Thursday at the New York Hall of Science, “Gingerbread Lane” is no ordinary gingerbread house. This exhibit takes a full year to develop and complete, requiring approximately 1,500 hours of labor.

“Jon Lovitch [the baker and builder] starts buying sale candy immediately after the holidays and baking eight to nine months out from the installation date. He has a two bedroom apartment and one bedroom is entirely devoted to the exhibit,” New York Hall of Science Director of Public Programs Liz Slagus told ABC News. “He does all the work himself which is actually one of the stipulations of Guinness World Records, that it has to be handmade and only gingerbread and only icing, so he strictly adheres to that.”

Lovitch created the museum’s exhibit last year, which took the Guinness World Record for world’s largest gingerbread village. This year’s goal was to double that to break his own record.

“About six months out from installation we put Lovitch in collaboration with our exhibits team here to build out the exhibit to accommodate him really trying to double his record from last year and put it into a new more highlighted area in the museum,” Slagus said. “It was hugely popular last year. It’s inspiring for young people to see this very handmade thing made into a spectacle.”

The full exhibit is made of 1000 gingerbread houses, 95 trees, six gingerbread cable cars, five gingerbread train cars, an underground candy subway station, a skating rink, candy trees, sugar signage and more. This year’s additions include even more New York City favorites: bridges, more cable cars, newsstands, the S.C. Kringle & Co. department store guarded by GBL nutcrackers and Candy Corn Commons featuring 10 varieties of candy corn.

Making all that – a 1.5 ton, 450-square-feet village – of course calls for a lot of dough and candy. To be exact, there are 600 pounds of candy, 600 pounds of gingerbread dough, 3,000 pounds of icing, 1,415 candy canes and 31 different styles of homes.

That tops last year’s exhibit, which clocked in at 1.5 tons, 300-square-feet with 500 pounds of gingerbread dough, 1,900 pounds of icing and 500 pounds of candy. Guinness will judge this year’s exhibit next week to officially declare it the largest.