The Radisson Blu Resort in St Julian's celebrated Christmas this year with a special, and highly specialised, 'sparkling' theme - in the form of a unique exhibition of edible jewellery that the hotel's Pastry Chef Robert Spiteri and his team have been working on since July.
Building on the concept of 'sparkling crystals', the works of culinary art are made of sugar paste - a combination of icing sugar, glycerine, gelatine and colour sprays. The concept was developed in conjunction with Diamonds International, which provided pictures of jewellery currently in its showrooms for Mr Spiteri and his team to base their edible replicas upon.
The exhibition has been received enthusiastically by the public, with some visitors actually having asked to purchase the works without realising that they were merely edible replicas, while others will be taking some of the pieces home to put on display once the exhibition wraps up.
The job at hand was not without its various difficulties, with the main hurdle being that there are no moulds to recreate the original jewellery's highly-intricate shapes and designs. As such, each and every piece had to be patiently crafted by hand, which took the team a total of 80 hours.
Apart from the fact that making sugar paste is as much a science as it is an art - requiring excruciatingly exact measurements of ingredients - the project was also at many times a case of trial and error since the team lacked the specialised kind of tools required to recreate pieces of jewellery. As such, much of the work was done on an experimental basis, and with splendid results.
Being one of the first Maltese pastry chefs trained in the art of sugar work, Mr Spiteri and his team hold the rare expertise and skills required to create such pieces. He was taught the art of sugar sculpture in Mestre, Italy at one of the many courses abroad that this very diverse pastry chef has attended.
Mr Spiteri has been a pastry chef for the last 13 years and has travelled abroad several times for specialised training in the field's varied disciplines. For example, he was trained in Verona for chocolate and in Rimini for ice cream. What drew him to becoming a pastry chef, he explains, are the vast diversity of sweets and the virtually limitless possibilities of what one can do with them.
He also believes that that one must be born with the right kind of passion to be a pastry chef, and that one cannot merely be taught the craft.
Among his greatest achievements as a pastry chef, he recalls, was serving the Queen of England at a banquet, for which he had created large sugar sculpture centrepieces. Along with his team of 12 people, Mr Spiteri also counts among his achievements catering for a 4,500-person event, and other large and distinguished events such as Presidential State Dinners and the August Moon Ball on 15 occasions.