Cakes! Very tasty cakes! One of the most remarkable features of the UEA50 Festival was the 16 outstanding entries into the Great Volcano cake-off. Delia meets academia.
Obviously they were tasted on the day and there were a few awards….but…. which one is your favourite? Tweet using the hashtags: volcanocake and uea50 or follow this link to our facebook page where you can cast your vote by liking your favourites. Results of the popular vote in a couple of weeks!
Rumours were circulating that 1.8 kg of ganache went into one entry alone and another entry showered the waiting ‘press corps’ with explosive sugar. The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted a lot of sciencey-looking kit around the cakes! Correct! The barriers between creativity, artistry and science came crashing down on that sunny autumn afternoon (often in a whoosh of fondant lava).
Here is our volcano-cake lowdown with a few categories to help you out a bit:
Magmatic mastery
Several of our cakes demonstrated that volcanoes go more than just skin deep!
Not only was this an cake attempt to portray what lies beneath but it also used cake layering techniques from both Indonesia and the Netherlands
This one has to be loved for its chilled margin along the edge of the conduit. Maaaagm-ificent! Great toffee spatter eruption too!
I think this is the one with the unbelievably delicious icing.
If ever there was a volcanic island that asks, nay demands, to be immortalised accurately in cake it’s Santorini. Brilliant idea and a gauntlet to all future volcano-cake makers. Next time we’ll be looking for something that immortalises the recent unrest and deformation (UEA50 style using a pump!)
Lava-loveliness!
Lava lake by my kids. Nice chocolate spatter girls!
Just brilliant use of jelly and chocolate for this glistening entry!
This one had a real conduit and quite the splendid eruption situation. Rumour had it the cake had to be a ‘a bit dense’ to pull off this effect.
Lava flow in fabulous toffee, by this stage its dinosaur body guards had to be removed for security reasons. See picture above for details!
Mount Wannahockaloogie exemplifying here the complex relationship between explosive and effusive activity and Choc-suvius just going for it on the straightforward explosive sparkles.
Campus, carnage and mayhem
Clearly, some of our competitors spent quite a bit of time fantasising about a real eruption on campus and then re-imagining it in cake. Too many disaster movies, competitors! (But if you want some help with a script Team Norfolk Firework Volcano are now available some evenings and weekends!)
The Campus’ famous Ziggurats were subjected to a fantastic orange red eruption down the front courtesy of an ingenious balloon pump. NB: bunnies!
Even ‘Broader’ (geddit) Campus mayhem here – were the sparkly red bits in the lava real popping candy? Not only that but there is quite the issue with Giant Wallace and Gromit Style Killer Bunnies and Nessie in the Broad going on here: watch out Ziggurats!
Widely touted as the Cake that Got Away from the Judges Awards, the spookily accurate reconstruction of Campus on the Day had a fab eruptive moment, although the hot weather deprived it of its plume (all the dry ice evaporated before lift off. I will resist jokes about global warming) :
Finally, a magnificient interpretation of a volcanic eruption rendered by some cake surrealists! Yippee! We’ve got it all going on here!
This was the only cake to realistically undergo sector collapse shortly after its sampling by our experienced Cake Judge Tim Kinnaird.
Many many thanks to Tahmeena Aslam and Fuchsia Wilkins for the cake enthusiasm that got this part of the Festival off the ground. What a success!
Norfolk Firework Volcano 