Incr-EDIBLE jungle : Tigers, monkeys, bugs, flowers and birds of paradise all made from CAKE

If you found yourself licking your lips when you watched The Great British Bake-off, brace yourself for some serious salivation.

These incredible pictures show the UK's largest cake installation, created for The Cake & Bake Show, which took place in Manchester this weekend.

The jaw-dropping creation took 17 bakers 6,000 hours to make and weighed 750kg, which included 40kg of chocolate.

And if you were to eat the entire thing, you might put on a tonne or two. You'd be consuming over 3 million calories.

The installation, which is being preserved for the next Cake and Bake Show taking place in October this year, includes a life-size baby elephant, a fabulous peacock, leopards, tigers, monkeys, rabbits, hedgehogs and parrots.



There's also a beautiful Hindu goddess and a crocodile with its jaws wide open.

It also boasts 1,700 hand-made flowers and 1,700 leaves. The team of bakers who created the project, known collectively as The CakeBomb, made 100 flowers and 100 leaves each.

Every tiny detail on the edible work of art is edible including the the grass and tiny bugs. Even the pebbles and the soil are made from chocolate and sugar.

In fact, it's so true to life there's even a fake elephant poo, which is made from chocolate and shredded wheat and was made from a mould of genuine elephant dropping!

So in case you've got a few thousand hours to spare to make your own, here's what you'll need to add to your next Ocado order: 34kg of flower paste, 500kg of sugar paste and 40kg of chocolate.

The installation, called 'Welcome to the Jungle', was nibbled on by TV chef Rosemary Shrager, Great British Bake Off winner John Whaite and TV baker Eric Lanlard at the show. But only the baby elephant that was cut into; the rest remains intact.

The Cakebomb group was set up by Francesca Pitcher of North Star Cakes.



One member of the group, Vicki Vicki Smith, 26, from Flintshire, said: 'I met some of the other girls at the cake shows I attend regularly and we’ve made friends. They needed to replace people in the group to have enough people to take on the workload.

'They didn’t want just anyone, they wanted people who had talent, and that we are but we all have our strengths so we used that to our advantage.

'They approached me a few months back so it’s been hard catching up to everyone but I made bugs leaves, flowers, a tree and two snow leopard cubs.'

Her dung beetles look worthy of a Bushtucker Trial and the flowers and branches that they are perched on are equally life-like.

Each dung beetle, no more than four inches long, took days to complete, while some of the more complicated items took even longer.

The display featured at least a dozen beetles.

For the insects she made a chocolate cake mould with edible blood from condensed milk sugar, food colouring and a raspberry chambord liquor with the wings made out of gelatine.

She also made 100 flowers made including hibiscus and frangipani as well as creating the leopard cubs by sculpting and moulding sponge cake together with jam and buttercream.

Juggling her job as a ceramic designer with her passion, Vicki has only been entering baking competitions for 12 months.

She first developed her passion for creating cakes when celebrating her lorry-driving boyfriend Lee Timmins’ 27th birthday in 2011.



Disappointed by the plain white cake that arrived which she had ordered, she decided to give put her ceramic skills to good use - and created her own two-part HGV lorry cake.

She has since competed in some of the UKs biggest cake-making competitions such as Manchester’s Cake International where she scooped the gold last year for her brown-and-yellow turtle cake with fondant fins - dedicated to her grandmother, Bella, who died last year aged of 91.

This year in March Vicki once again took gold for her design of popular advert character baby Oleg from Compare the Meerkat advert - a cake which took her 50 hours to make.

However luck has not always been on Vicki’s side as her first competition in Birmingham in 2013 almost ended in disaster when her cake design of a bulldog’s head fell off at the event.

Her fast-thinking dad caught the head before it smashed on the floor and even with only half a design she took the silver award and has learned a few tricks along the way.

Vicki said: 'When I loaded the bulldog cake into the car I noticed that it was slightly cracking so I tried to fill it in but it was getting bigger.

'When I got to the event and the head came right off and my dad managed to catch it in his hand before it landed on the floor. I was absolutely devastated and cried for ages, I was so exhausted and now I would have nothing to show for it.

'I realised where my downfall was as I didn’t use a support for the cake, usually I use dowels, from now on I generally use flat cakes if I can’t use anything to support it.'


Source : DM

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