~ SPECIAL REVIEW ~

For the perfect Christmas table centrepiece, choose Cacao’s bejewelled gingerbread house.

Our experience

MoMo & Coco have scoured the irresistible sugar land of Melbourne to find a selection of the most covetable Christmas treats for your festive wishing and dreaming. Our first special review covered a perfect stocking filler from Burch & Purchese, our second featured exquisitely creative, themed macarons from Luxbite, our third review was a photographic narration of one of the most memorable, dessert-focused exhibition that Melbourne has ever curated, a fourth listed Melbourne’s best Christmas dessert bargains, and… *drum roll*…we dedicate our fifth and final review to the family spirit of Christmas…

Cacao Chocolatier is one of Melbourne’s leading specialty sweet boutiques. Although it offers a diverse range of chocolate bites, chocolate sculptures and at one store, beautiful mousse-cake creations, the authors of this dessert-only blog are especial fans of Cacao’s high-powered macarons (see our review here). For Christmas 2012, Cacao’s glorious Gingerbread House is a serious piece of eye candy. 😛 The perfect centrepiece for this Christmas’ lunch or dinner, no?

Bejewelled with an assortment of candy — spotted and neon meringue droplets, lurid ovoid shell chocolates, twisted salted pretzels, sugary square jubes — Cacao’s Gingerbread House is a sizeable creation. When you first undo the tape of the box and lift the lid, that beautiful warm aroma of gingerbread is simply divine. We closed our eyes for a full ten seconds, chromed it all in and pretended that we were in the middle of Christmas markets in Nuremburg or Munich. *Sigh* On tasting though, the gingerbread is only very lightly spiced. The gingerbread used is not the chewy type, but rather rock hard (as commonly used in gingerbread sculpturing).  The house is constructed from about seven pieces: two for the roof, one for the base and four for the four-sided house. The pieces are joined by what we believe to be traditional royal icing (a glacial-hard concoction of egg whites and icing sugar), and this also theatrically drips from the eaves of the roofing. The house is dusted over with a sprinkling of icing sugar, perhaps to evoke a snowy scene. A fat little icing Santa man the guards ajar door.

Dessert adventure checklist

1. ☑ Dessert destination: Cacao Fine Chocolates and Patisserie, Melbourne GPO, Crn of Bourke and Elizabeth Street, Melbourne CBD, Vic 3000. Three other locations.
2. ☑ Budget: $$ ($34.95)
3. ☑ Sweet irresistibles: Cake.
4. ☑ Must-eat: Gingerbread house.
5. ☑ The short and sweet story: For the perfect Christmas table centrepiece, choose Cacao’s bejewelled gingerbread house.

With this final post for 2012, these Dessert Correspondents MoMo & Coco wish all our lovely readers a happy and relaxing festive season! We will be back in early January with a round-up of Mebourne’s best desserts in 2012, and a rather special dessert series. Thank you again!