The most elaborate Bellagio Conservatory Holiday Display ever. The display includes a 440 lb 7ft tall Gingerbread House. The Gingerbread House on display embodies the Bellagio Holiday Tradition, Craftsmanship, and Flavor. The Conservatory’s holiday showcase for 2022 is titled “Gingerbread Dreams, a Holiday Confection.” Besides the gingerbread Victorian and the Fabergé eggs, the display includes 6-foot chocolate trees also created by Angibeau and team. A custom scent, “Gingerbread Dreams,” will meander with notes of clove, cinnamon, vanilla and apple. The Bellagio Conservatory, is where the Giant Gingerbread House Holiday Display shelters within a mammoth replica of a bedizened Fabergé Egg, separated from the attentions of seasonal revelers by an artificial pond. Too tall to fit through the door. The Gingerbread House is built on a foam undercarriage. Batches of dough were rolled out in sheets, then pressed with a mold to form surface details in the bricks and shingles faced in chocolate. Gingerbread clad in fondant forms the columns. A snowy turret crowns the house. Rhinestone icicles and faux gemstones trim the facade. Edible icing acts as mortar, holding things together.
Philippe Angibeau, executive pastry chef of Bellagio, led a crew of 10 that fashioned the gingerbread house, which is presented, along with the rest of the Conservatory display, through Jan. 1.
“We would work on it an hour or two at a time,” he said, “depending on the business volume.” “It’s fragile,” Angibeau said of the gingerbread house, the largest he’s ever assembled. “A lot of things fall off on the way to the Conservatory that we have to fix.” The house was going to be too tall to construct in the Bellagio bakery, so it was built in a special kitchen space whose door frame was removed to provide egress. The finished house stands 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide and weighs 440 pounds. When complete, the house was lifted by the pallet jack, then wheeled down various hallways, across the casino and into the Conservatory. For the first time, assorted gingerbread cookies, chocolates, popcorn and other confections from the Bellagio bakery can be purchased at the display, in the alcove behind the south flower bed from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.
