just what I was thinking!
When I saw the cakes in this show, and learned that many of the participants would spend MONTHS working on their cakes, I wondered to myself why they should even look like cakes. I mean, if someone tried to actually decorate a real cake with a design that takes months, then, to me, it's not realistic. I had always assumed the cakes in the show were real. It was only this year I learned most of them were cake dummies. I feel that if you're going to do a design that wouldn't be possible on a real cake, then you shouldn't make it look like a cake, since it will never BE a cake....you know what I mean?
As a pastry chef, I would say that definitely part of the challenge of doing intricate cakes is the timing, because since cakes are food, you only have a work window that is so big and you can only do so much. I have spent many an all nighter working on an intricate cake, because since they need to be top quality inside AND out and freshness counts, that's the only choice I had.
I mean geez, if I had MONTHS to work on a cake, they'd all be spectacularly perfect like that.
Then on top of that, there's all the explaining you have to do to prospective brides. I can see a bride going to the show and loving a cake that just happened to be fake......she takes a picture, then comes to your shop and shows you the picture and says, "I want that", then you have to explain that there's no way you can do that because it would take too long, and that cake at the show wasn't real and..........argh....what a nightmare. Explaining stuff to brides is hard enough as it is.......let alone having to deal with stuff like that.
My opinion? All the cakes should be real. If it's a matter of showing off art, then maybe it should be the clay art show. You can do everything a sugar artist does in fondant and pastillage with polymer clay. I thought the point of sugar art is that it's EDIBLE. What's the point of putting edible sugar pieces on plastic or styrofoam dummies? I really don't get it.:crazy:
