Apparently Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a documentary -- not a work of fiction -- because London has just played host to an edible "cake hotel." The rug is meringue, the books are cake and a doughnut tower. It looks like pretty much every horizontal surface was covered by diabetes some sort of sugary confection.
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The eight-room "Tasting House" promotion was funded by, unsurprisingly, Tate & Lyle Sugars. Apparently, it's introducing a new line of brown sugars that hail from different parts of the world. There were eight rooms in all, each with their own theme.
Tate & Lyle's Sugar Cake Hotel from Justin Addleton on Vimeo.
In the end, the amount of sweet sweat on display is a little staggering. All told, the bakers put in around 2,900 hours of baking and constructing to fill eight rooms with over 1,300 pounds of sugar. So what was in those eight rooms? Here's what they had to say on their webpage:
- A Mediterranean-inspired bedroom, with edible furnishings, a caramel popcorn-filled bathtub, floating meringues and edible pearlescent popcorn bunting, all created using Light Soft Brown sugar. The perfect location for a midnight feast!
- A Pirates of the Caribbean room, with a giant treasure chest full of edible pearls, ginger spiced doubloons, and cutlasses, which visitors can spray gold themselves, and rum and raisin chocolate brownies and tea cakes -- all made from Taste Experience Caribbean-inspired Light Muscovado sugar
- A British-inspired Golden syrup sugar room, with a giant golden-syrup lion, patriotic treacle tarts in the shape of the British Isles and a giant tower of doughnuts
- A Mayan-inspired room hidden in the cellar featuring a Mayan fudge temple, complete with floating meringue 'clouds', 'sacrificial' salted caramel and chocolate hearts, and Mayan-inspired carved gold cookies all made from Taste Experience Mayan-inspired golden caster sugar
- A Mississippi-inspired 'Mardi Gras' room featuring a five foot long rainbow cake in the traditional colours of green, yellow & purple, gold baby heads and of course King Cakes
- A Barbados-inspired library, with edible shells, and beautiful hand-painted cookies, fruit cakes and florentines showcased as museum features inside vintage glass jars, all made from Barbados inspired Dark Muscovado sugar
- A Guyanese-inspired room, complete with a sea turtle cake, and cake 'turtle eggs' buried in mounds of Demerara sugar
- A South Pacific-inspired room with a huge two metre high Easter Island statue, made entirely from chocolate mud cake baked using Golden Granulated sugar
One lucky couple was even invited to stay the evening; presumably bathing in candy corn, reading beneath the light of a candied lamp, and waking up with the worst sugar hangover they've ever experienced.
The food engineers behind this endeavor flow from "Miss Cakehead" and a team of 14 cake makers. While this work may be cute and Wonka-esque, we've actually written about her normally ghoulish works before.
