Kimberly Lin-McCartney leads three-metre edible Christmas tree construction

An army of 12 pastry chefs are baking and assembling 5,000 gingerbread cookies on an acrylic structure to create a three-metre high edible Christmas tree at Corinthia Hotel London.

The recipe needed for this mammoth task includes 80kg flour, 48kg golden syrup, 3kg cinnamon, 180 egg yolks and 5 litres of milk.

Head pastry chef Kimberly Lin-McCartney said: “This tree’s a giant – it’s taking over the kitchen. We are spicing the biscuits really heavily to make the whole lobby smell deliciously Christmassy.

“It took some team ingenuity to get the structure into the hotel as many of the doors and entrances