Algonquin pastry arts instructor bakes another prize-winning gingerbread house
Posted on Tuesday, December 10th, 2019
Algonquin College pastry arts chef Catherine Beddall has added some icing to her award-winning reputation with another top showing at a prestigious American competition.
Beddall’s entry was among the top ten adult winners in the 27th Annual National Gingerbread House Competition in Asheville, North Carolina on November 18. The competition attracted more than 220 bakers with their all-edible designs.
“It’s my vision of the ultimate fantasy getaway in miniature,” Beddall says in describing her gingerbread construction.
Fantasy, indeed. Beddall’s entry is an intricate fairytale-inspired treehouse, a miniature condominium of tiny apartments, rickety staircases, and canopied gazebos with tree-stump stools, all surrounded by a blue pond edged with snow-dappled earthen banks.
This year’s entry was the second one for Beddall in this competition. In 2018, she placed second with a gingerbread clock that featured a tiny mouse couple in a kitchen inside the clock, sitting at a table as they decorate an even tinier gingerbread house.
These showings – two top-ten selections in as many years – are, perhaps, not surprising when you consider that Beddall has been preparing for them since childhood.
It was her maternal grandmother who introduced her as a child to the baking arts. “Baking tea biscuits and cookies with my grandmother is one of my earliest memories, and I still use her recipes to this day,” she says. “She had a sweet tooth, just as I do, and a wonderful talent for baking. I credit her for many of my basic skills.”
But then Beddall’s “slight gingerbread obsession,” as she puts it, is also rooted in childhood. “As a child, I was fascinated by stories of fairies and trolls and little people who had their homes in tree stumps and toadstools. I liked to picture myself living with them in those places. What I’m doing (with gingerbread) is my vision of those ultimate fairy houses.”
This mix of childhood memory and love of baking was a long time in coming together. In the 1990s, Beddall abandoned her pursuit of a journalism degree to sign on to Algonquin’s Graphic Design program, graduating in 1998. A 12-year stint as a designer with the federal government ensued.
Fate, however, provided ingredients for another direction. Beddall has always retained her childhood fondness for baking and when a friend asked her to make a wedding cake she happily complied. The cake proved so popular that more requests followed and the public servant soon found herself with a part-time job providing pastries and cakes.
Beddall returned to Algonquin in 2010 to take the one-year Baking and Pastry Arts program, intent on becoming a professional pastry chef. Nearly ten
years – and several dozen gingerbread houses – later, she is still at Algonquin, working as a Chef Instructor in the College’s culinary arts program. When Beddal graduated in 2011 the College thought she was too good to lose and offered her a teaching position.
“I love teaching and sharing what I know about baking and decorating,” she says.
Her love of what she does is evident in her bestselling 2016 book, The Magic of Gingerbread, for which Beddall did the baking, the photography, and
wrote the recipes. She attributes the book’s popularity to the exposure the pastry arts and the craft of baking have received through television food shows and social media.
“Cake decorating is very popular these days,” she says. “It’s a creative outlet for many people, a way to create something of beauty.”
But what about Beddall’s future creations? Besides continuing to teach, she’s also thinking about a new book. As well, she has an entry in the Food Network’s Holiday Gingerbread Showdown that airs on December 18.
Then, of course, there’s next year’s National Gingerbread House Competition. “I plan to go back to try to get in the top three again and, hopefully, win.”
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