It’s December! As we get closer to Christmas, we’ve been busy putting up decorations all around SKYCITY. Our talented Pastry team have also been hard at work, recently finishing their year long projects! Created by the team, a beautiful Gingerbead house and a Penguin Christmas Village are now being displayed at the SKYCITY Hotel and the SKYCITY Grand Hotel, respectively.
Made from 60kg gingerbread dough, 20kg icing and plenty of decorative lollies, our Gingerbread House stands at 1.6m tall, 1.3m long, and 1m deep. It's an amazing display with intricate designs and decorations, and beautiful Christmas fairies.
But it's not all pastry, icing and gingerbread which make up displays like these. There's electricity and mechanics involved to create the lighting, base structure and moving parts including an old microwave plate for the penguins' skating platform.
A team of pastry chefs, electricians, engineers, welders and carpenters have been tirelessly designing, baking, moulding, welding, and building to put together both displays over the past couple of months.
"This kind of project gives the team the chance to learn from each other and experiment with both the creative and technical elements of putting something like this together. It's a great opportunity to push boundaries and create something bigger and better with even more wow factor than the previous year," says Lisa Crowe, Executive Pastry Chef, who has been leading the teams.
"We couldn't have pulled this off without the help of our entire pastry team, including those who held the fort by continuing to deliver our core services while everything was being built and put together.
"We would like to thank everyone who made our displays possible including: Carpenters Frank van der Kolk and Tim Jenkins who helped us with the wooden boards and canvas, Electricians Alan Shrimpton and Manfred Frieling who helped with lighting and power supply, HVAC Welder Trade Assistant, James Smith who helped us with all the metal work and the teams at SKYCITY Hotel and the Grand for supporting us all the way through," says Lisa.
