Early in 2008 we were contacted by Jen at Chocolatician to see if we could assist her in making a replica of the victorian helter skelter on Brighton Pier… In chocolate cake. The cake was to be exhibited in the Brighton Festival and had to be perfect.
She needed our help because it wasn’t going to be possible to simply make a tall cake, carve it to shape and then cover it in chocolate. This was for a number of reasons, not least the need for an accurate conical helix for the slide.
It became clear that we were going to need to reverse engineer this cake, starting on the outside and working inwards, before putting the final touches to the outside once the main body was made.
So we combined forces. Us relying on Jen’s expert chocolate knowledge and Jen using our engineering skills to build the external structure of the cake.
We made moulds, chocolate formers, spiral helixes, floating chocolate rulers and even a chocolate guillotine and by the end of a week we had a pretty amazing cake which was a triumph at the festival.
If you’d like to have an inkling of how we did it then have a flick through these photos.
