With Christmas round the corner, the preparation for the festivities is in full swing at The Leela ambience Gurugram. If you happen to visit the hotel at this time, you will find the highlight of the season, the Colossal Gingerbread House adorning the hotel Grand Lobby along with the many classic Christmas hues and traditional festive decorations.
Created by the bakery team of the hotel under the guidance of Executive Pastry Chef Anurag Barthwal, the Gingerbread House is 6.4 m high and 11.5m wide and used 7888 edible ginger tiles, 900 Kgs of ginger bread and 600 kgs of royal icing, made of icing sugar and egg white. To give an idea of how magnificent the house is, it took almost 15 days to build it, with 3 chefs and a couple of trainees working continuously. The house was unveiled for the first time for public viewing on December 5th, 2017 and will be on display till Christmas.
Explaining the modality of the structure, Sangeet Panwar, Pastry Chef – Leela said, “We set a target and start a month back procuring the materials to build up the Gingerbread tiles, planning the shifts on who will work when and how much tiles do we need to produce on a particular day. First the dough is made; there is 1 guy in every shift who roles out the dough, sheets them, cuts the tiles and starts baking them. Then we stack the tiles in 1 section for about 2 weeks. Then the engineering team comes into the picture and put the structure of the entire house, a wooden structure standing on iron rods. It is then handed to us and we then start sticking the tiles to the structure and then placing the icing on the top of these tiles. The decoration is then done by the house-keeping team. We design them in such a way that they don’t break or don’t catch fungus easily. It is a time-consuming process but we always try to come out with something different.”
Interestingly, the gingerbread house that was built last year was the 7th biggest in Asia. “We will possibly break the records this time again by making this the biggest in India this year, if no other hotel has thought of such a concept,” said Chef Sangeet.
In the middle of the hotel lobby stands the 7m high Monumental Christmas Tree decorated with traditional ornaments. There is also an extended area inside the Gingerbread house that has been set up to host all the Christmas and New Year parties.
After the house was readied, the chefs started preparing the Christmas edible items. The inside of the house has on display a variety of homemade Christmas goodies starting from plum cakes, plum pudding, chocolate Santa’s, Dundee cake, miniature of ginger bread houses, Christmas stollen, cakes, and assorted cookies that are put on sale. There are also a complete range of Christmas hampers that will be given away as gifts marking the beautiful occasion.
Like any other year, as a part of its philanthropy the hotel will try to celebrate the true spirit of Christmas through the Sunshine project for the underprivileged children. By making a donation, one can stand a chance to win some exciting prizes from the hotel.
Christmas festivity has already seeped in at The Leela Ambience Gurugram Hotel, as was evident from the preparations that was going on for the past 1 month, but this time it is going to be a bigger affair with bigger celebrations.
-TravelRasoi