A team of five Christmas fairies and elves have created a handmade gingerbread tree at Hilton London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 for this year’s festive season.
Made in-house by the hotel’s magical engineering team and chefs, the gingerbread tree stands at four metres tall and will be located in the spacious lobby until January 2013. This Christmas decoration took a total of 376 man hours to craft from start to finish.
This includes eight hours for the engineering department to build the frame supporting the massive structure, whilst chefs baked the gingerbread biscuits over a period of four weeks taking 320 hours to make a massive 1,200 pieces of gingerbread.
For a tree of this size, a whole range of ingredients were used including 80kg of plain flour, 14kg of treacle, 8kg of honey, 400grams of bicarbonate of soda and 400grams of baking powder, 200 whole eggs, 240 egg whites to make the icing, 92kg of icing sugar and 150grams of cream of tartar. The tree is also decorated with 240 chocolates used as baubles and finished with a selection of presents for good boys and girls under the tree.
Alexandra Mosquito, hotel manager at Hilton London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, comments: “Christmas is an important time for our business and leisure guests and we wanted to create something a little out of the ordinary this year. With a hotel full of special artwork, we felt a hand crafted tree would be a perfect festive addition. The whole lobby has a wonderful Christmas feel to it and the tree really is the pièce de résistance, made even more meaningful for our team and guests knowing that it was handmade here.”
