A few blocks away from the complex where I grew up was a construction site, and I walked past it daily on my way to school. In the first few weeks, a wooden frame lay upon the ground. Once the foundations were set, beams were erected and the walls climbed upward until finally it came time for the ceiling to be installed.
For centuries, pastries were constructed in very much the same way. A tart or cake is built upward with cream as “cement” between the layers of sponge and garnished with an ornament or “cherry on top.” And this was the way I started to construct last winter’s new dessert, which featured gingerbread. I layered thin pieces of chocolate on top of one another with a light ginger-spiced mousse in between to “glue” the structure together. It was sturdy, but had all the charisma of a brick wall.
We build houses with wood, concrete, and nails, but surely we could draw inspiration from other structures for desserts, I thought. I began to notice the way other animals in nature construct their dwellings. How a spiderweb spirals from the center to the outside. The honeybee hive slowly fills in the space of crevices. And there’s magic behind the way nature creates every snowflake.
With Christmas just around the corner, the rest of the team gathered for our little tree-lighting ceremony in the greenhouse behind the bakery. I arrived to see a beautifully lit tree, but I also noticed a singular pinecone ornament on a table nearby. From a distance I had mistaken it for a cake. That became the cornerstone for my idea.
The next day, I piped a soft gingerbread-spiced mousse in a spiral tower. Rather than building my dessert from bottom to top, I carefully placed more than sixty small pieces of chocolate, the size and shape of pinecone scales, around the dessert. A light dusting of confectioners’ sugar, and all of a sudden, it looked like a solitary pinecone, covered with snow.
If it were up to most cooks, gingerbread would be built into houses, not pinecones. But why not think like a bee or a spider and take inspiration from Mother Nature? Ants were constructing colonies in the sand long before man sought temporary shelter in a cave. We put into practice a small percentage of what’s possible. Entire universes exist within our own, and we are free to borrow as we please.