And boy, what a cupcake: a giant, gleeful creamy splodge comprising masses of vanilla sponge stuffed with buttercream topped with a thick wad of pink-and-white icing, sugar sprinkles and a ridiculously huge fake cherry. Kitsch, very; a little plasticy-tasting, maybe; but fun? Surely.
My favourite cupcake recipe book, Kate Shirazi's Cupcake Magic calls cupcakes "little cakes with attitude". But this cupcake is anything but little. Measuring 1.25m by 1.2m and weighing just over 150kg, containing 200 eggs and taking around 50 hours to make, it even had its own set of six foot tall, burly bodyguards surrounding it.
"It looks a bit like a Disney cake. I think someone might jump out of it," said one lady who had come to see it in her lunch hour. She was right about the Disney bit; this giant, baked and iced by award-winning cake decorator Michelle Wibowo to celebrate Covent Garden Real Food Market was the stuff of every wide-eyed five year old's princess dreams. Lots of of pink, lots of sugar and, well, just a tiny bit over-the-top looking too...
Surprisingly, the sponge was neither too sugary nor so dry as to stick in your throat. I normally struggle with mountains of cupcake cream and end up scraping most of it off, but this buttercream filling was thick yet light and not too sickly-sweet for me. The icing on the outside was a real killer, though - so much sugar you'd keel over, though it suited the tastebuds of one volunteer taster just fine. "Delicious," he said. "That icing is perfect. It's so sweet I'm quivering."
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