If you’ve paid attention to social media lately then you know that cake is having a moment. Everything, it seems, has been turned into cake with some startlingly lifelike results but now one of these baked creations takes the cake — pun intended. A British artist has created a life-sized cake version of Colin Firth to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice miniseries.
Created by Michelle Wibowo, the cake creation is done to resemble Firth’s Mr. Darcy and while it is definitely an actual cake, it’s also a truly a work of art. According to Variety, Wibowo spent three weeks and 200 hours crafting the cake which stands six feet tall, and took more than 40 pounds of flour, 40 pounds of butter, and nearly 100 pounds of sugar. To top it all off, the Darcy cake also had to be transported five hours from Wibowo’s home to its final destination, the Lyme Park, Cheshire, England property used as Mr. Darcy’s home in the BBC series.
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As one might guess, creating a cake of this size required some internal support as well as detailed design and according to Wibowo, each later of the cake has metal support.
“The structure is metal. There is metal support for each layer of cake into the metal rods,” she explained. “I did it part by part — the legs, the body, the arms and the last piece was the head. It was really difficult to capture! I kept tweaking it for over a week. It was always challenging because when I sculpt, I sit down for 10 to 15 hours before the nighttime, and then the next morning, I see something’s different — something I didn’t notice — and then I keep changing it until I’m happy. But at a certain point, I have to stop!”
Even with the process and the supports, Wibowo says the cake is in fact edible — and she’s sampled it herself.
“Yes, it’s Victoria Sponge with vanilla buttercream, chocolate ganache and fondant icing on the outside,” she explained. “I did have a bite of his shoulder, too. It was good.”
The Mr. Darcy cake was commissioned by UKTV as part of a celebration of the Pride and Prejudice anniversary and to help celebrate the launch of their Jane Austen Season which will see UKTV Play and Drama air the 2009 Emma BBC mini-series, the 2008 BBC Sense & Sensibility mini-series, and of course, Pride and Prejudice on Sundays from September 6th through 20th.
What do you think about this lifelike cake of Firth as Mr. Darcy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
