Is It Really Cake?

A friend of mine brought this remarkable "cake" to my attention.  It was too good an opportunity to pass up so I asked her to do a guest post for us.  To my surprise, she agreed - another example of "never ask, never get".  Enjoy ~

Few of his clients know that Bob Hansen, a multi-talented construction contractor who does work for me from time to time has another life as a painter cum cake master.  His often whimsical, always Food-Network-worthy cakes are the stuffs of legend and perennial winners at the local July 4th county fair.  The only times Bob didn't win was when he didn't compete in order to (in his own words)  "give others a chance". Lucky for us fans, this year Bob somehow managed to vanquish his altruistic feelings and reentered the fray.  The result? What else but another cake that took the cake:

Love the details!  crumpled paper on the floor,  note on pad, printer output on the floor...

Lest anybody thinks this tour de force is a mere concoction of colorful plastic gizmos and thingies, I should point out that all but the legs and antennae of the butterfly are edible. The chair pad and back are real ginger bread; the cables are black licorice; the pencil and apple are gum paste; the floor is royal ice painted with food coloring to look like wood planks.  

The desk is a multi-functional engineering marvel featuring a built-in printer, an USB port with flash drive and a few SD memory slots. One side is the printer's in-feed and the other side is the out-feed with a catch rack made from sugar dough.  Great space saving design with patent pending by the way. The legal pad, which most would agree to be the pièce de resistance, is gum paste overlaid with icing upon which an edible food printer is used to print the lines with food colored ink. Ditto for the computer display and printouts.  

Left side view - more details: cellphone charging, printer paper feed...

What is that iridescent butterfly doing on the back of the chair, you ask? It turned out it's Bob's trademark signature which is guaranteed to give copycats nightmares. Originally Bob intended to create a figurine to sit at the desk but ran out of time.  No problem, the absence was ingeniously covered up by the inscription "I'll be right back" on the legal pad. Pretty slick, eh?

Crumpled notepaper turned into crumbs!

Incredible?  Apparently others agreed.  On the first day of the fair, some faithless soul came along and, instead of stuffing a chunk of cake into his/her mouth (which would have been reasonable), pulverized  the computer printout and legal pad page that were on the cake floor just to be satisfied that they weren't real paper.  Not to be outdone, the next day another (or maybe the same) villain ripped off the loose page from the legal pad.   After that, since the fair still had two more days to go, I no longer had the heart to follow the fate of Bob's masterpiece.  Now who says the Americans are a nation of lemmings that blindly run over cliffs?

- With thanks to sanssoucci

Bob Hansen actually makes custom cakes -  http://isitreallycake.com/