Be Grand Resort Bohol, the premier luxury resort in Panglao Island, has pulled out all the stops for its Christmas festivities. Apart from unveiling five grand Christmas trees in its lobby and an exhilarating five-minute firework display during its tree-lighting ceremony, Be Grand Resort also presented to its guests another showstopper: a gingerbread house, beloved the world over for its whimsical nature and comforting aroma, but done up in grand style.
Spires rose up into the ceilings of the Food Hall, frosted windows shone through with warm light, and the whole thing towered over any child (and even some grownups!).
A Gingerbread Palace, Not a House
The custom of constructing a gingerbread house is mostly European in origin, with spiced cookie dough cut and assembled to resemble a one-story house. But Be Grand Resort’s pastry team, working together with the design team and Berben Wood’s (a sister company) engineering team, constructed not a mere house but a palace. The result is a gothic steepled confectionary fantasy that stands at a towering eight feet by ten feet, bedecked in snow icing and twinkling lights. Ten people worked round the clock to complete the palace in time for the holidays.
Resident interior designer Alyssa Kae Mallari shares that the process of this particular baked delight began not in the kitchen but in the drawing room. Before the gingerbread dough was even mixed, she was tasked to create the design for it all. “The goal was to make a gingerbread house bigger than last year’s. I drew inspiration from German palaces and castes, particularly the Hohenzollern Castle and Heidelberg Palace.” So she laid out the plan of the palace on the design software AutoCAD, not just the final result but each piece, each cookie shingle, wall, and window grille and pane, in precise measurements. “We worked out scaled drawings and had to figure out how to build a stable-enough foundation. And as per the pastry team’s request, I had to make the measurements in inches and feet, and even had to circumfit the proportions to match the space constraints.”
Months of Repairing, A Fortnight of Baking
And all this began long before the holidays. Plans for building a grand gingerbread house began long before the holidays, in September. By the second week of October, the ideas started to gain more cohesion, and the blueprints were drawn. And from then on, the construction of the foundation and supports began in earnest. Two weeks before the unveiling, the baking process began. As with all gingerbreads, this one involved your basic cookie dough with the added zing of cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. These spices are what make the gingerbread palace such an olfactory delight as well as being a visual one. Be Grand Resort’s pastry team is no stranger to churning out huge volumes of baked goods. But the sheer volume of this project initially gave them pause. There was the time constraint to consider as well. “We even tried to scale it down, because it really was going to be enormous. But we pushed through with the original plan, and I’m proud to say the team pulled it off.”
And so on the eve of November 25, with guests from Bohol and Cebu in attendance, as well as member of the local government and the media, the gargantuan gingerbread palace was finally revealed to the world. Spires rose up into the ceilings of the Food Hall, frosted windows shone through with warm light, and the whole thing towered over any child (and even some grownups!). If the awed reactions of the crowd were any indication, the confection accomplished exactly what it meant to do, to signal a grand holiday season at Be Grand Resort.
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