Some Favourite Things: Beatriz Muller

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Beatriz Muller

If you live in Ontario and enjoy reading the LCBO publication Food and Drink, you might have picked up this holiday season issue.

There are so many wonderful articles, entertaining ideas and attention-getting recipes (who can say 'no' to eggplant bacon for heaven's sake!) that it would be worth your while to find one of these at your local outlet if possible.

On page 36 there's a 2-page spread about Beatriz Muller's amazing gingerbread creations (CakesbyBeatriz.com) Beatriz lives and works in Innisfil, Ontario and creates traditional European cakes using only best quality ingredients. Because she is somewhat of a perfectionist, I will give you her info directly off her website:

Beatriz Muller is an award-winning Certified Master Sugar Artist and Gingerbread Architect who has been decorating and designing custom cakes professionally for over 15 years. Known internationally for her cake art and gingerbread masterpieces, you can find her work in magazines around the world and see her compete on network television.

She has achieved many outstanding awards for her gingerbread creations, including first prize at the 2016 National Gingerbread House competition held annually at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina and second place just a couple weeks ago as well as the 2018 Grand Prize Winner on Food Network's "Holiday Gingerbread Showdown".

Food Network 2018

These houses are a far cry from the Christmas houses the kids and I used to put together every year using graham crackers and candies with molten sugar (!) and royal icing. I remember how much fun and work were involved in building those tiny houses and also the immense satisfaction we had with the final products.

Dream House 2016 Grand Prize Winner Asheville, NC

Getting photos of Beatriz Muller's gingerbread houses onto a blog post is so tricky - there aren't many photos out there and then you understand that you really need to be there to walk all around peer into the windows and crannies to see the incredible detail.

The structures require intensive planning and scale drawings, then pieces of gingerbread are trimmed to the millimetre after coming out of the oven. Beatriz' daughter helps her and I believe there are other members of the team as well. Can you imagine the effort involved in transporting it to the venue?

Here's a video of one of Beatriz Muller's most recent creations, Perspective House, which came second in the 2019 National Gingerbread House Competition in Asheville. Here's what she says about it:

"The way we choose to see the world creates the world we see" Barry Kaufman

Perspective was inspired by Escher's Relativity and Cinta Vidals Gravitas surreal paintings. It is a multidimensional piece and it shows a world where people are living among each other but on different planes of existence, with different worldviews, and the illusion of separation without realizing that they are all connected, sharing the same hopes and dreams for a better future. Surreal architecture calls into question the concept of stillness and movement, rigidity and constant flux, the concrete and the abstract, and buried within the dream is reality.

I don't want to close this blog post leaving readers with the impression that Beatriz Muller is only about fantastical gingerbread houses. She also creates wedding cakes, birthday cakes, Yule Logs and cookies and even gingerbread boxes filled with cookies. Her creations all look very impressive and if you live in the area north of Toronto it might be well worth your while to seek her out if you have a special occasion in the future.

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