Gingerbread monolith sweetens Christmas Day in San Francisco – CNET [CNET]

Many a household has built a gingerbread house as part of its Christmas holiday decorations. Typically, it’s small enough to fit on a platter on the dining room table. But in San Francisco, some ambitious baker/builder assembled one that’s more like a modernist skyscraper — a gingerbread monolith.

The towering baked good appeared mysteriously on Christmas morning on a promontory in San Francisco’s Corona Heights Park. It seems to be roughly eight feet tall, its gingerbread slabs held together by icing, with a smattering of gumdrop rivets, according to local news reports and tweets from passersby.

Monoliths are a very end-of-2020 phenomenon, though this may be the first dessert-themed one. Beginning with the discovery of a metal monolith that had appeared in the Utah desert, bringing to mind a similar structure in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, shiny monoliths began popping up around the world, from Romania to the UK to California, too.

In a tweet, KQED producer/reporter Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez said the general manager of the city’s recreation and parks department will remain indefinitely, “until the cookie crumbles.”

Apparently, some people couldn’t resist the temptation:

Some other tasty observations about the gingerbread monolith: