a day ago
Can you tell what's real and what's cake? Test yourself against the Bake King
The French theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that modern society had replaced reality with signs. 'The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none,' he wrote. 'The simulacrum is true.' As images proliferate they become distorted, first so they bear increasingly little relation to reality, and eventually to a point where nothing bears any relation to the real world. All we have are images of things.
Baudrillard would have been entertained by the things being done to cakes recently. If you watched The Great British Bake-Off in 2022 and 2023, you may recall a series of advertisements for Sainsbury's Taste the Difference range. At the start of the ad break, viewers were shown a delicious-looking plate of food. A rib of beef, a banana, a bottle of orange juice, a baked camembert. A kitchen knife would hover over them. At the end of the break, the knife would cut into the dish revealing whether it was what it appeared to be or, as was often the case, a cake ingeniously decorated to look like something else.
'The internet seems to fetishise the genre of hyper-realistic things being made of cake,' says Freddy Taylor, from the advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy, who came up with the idea for the ads. 'So bringing this strange fake-cake cultural phenomenon to Tuesday evenings seemed to really tickle people.' Just months later, Netflix launched a gameshow, Is It Cake?, based on this premise, in which contestants guess by sight whether objects are what they seem, or cakey simulacra. It became the second most-watched show on Netflix in the UK the month it was released.
The cake decoration genius behind the Sainsbury's ads was Ben Cullen, known as The Bake King, who has amassed 493,000 followers on Instagram and some 368,000 on TikTok since he began making hyper-realistic cakes more than a decade ago.
He's made cakes for private and celebrity clients, including Rita Ora, and for film and TV launches (for HBO's The Last of Us he made a terrifying 'clicker', one of the varieties of mushroom-infected zombie), as well as countless TV appearances, including Channel 4's Extreme Cake Makers. Now, Cullen has written a book, Cake or Fake?, in which he offers step-by-step instructions for people wanting to make their own illusion cakes at home.
To prove it was possible, Cullen, 35, invited me to his studio just outside Chester to make one myself.
'One of the first things people say to me is, 'Ben, you could hold my hand, but I would never be able to do what you do,'' he says. 'I want people to know that anyone can do it. It was important to me that the cakes in the book were accessible. I don't want people to be deflated. I want them to think, 'This is class, I could do this again for my kid's birthday.''
For my tutorial, Cullen has chosen a pizza, one of his classic illusions. The recipe has a rigorous 23 steps, and begins: 'Start with a round cake.' Cullen is an artist, not a baker. (He dabbled in tattoos – his skin is almost completely covered in them – and fine art, before he found his talent for making cakes look like other things.) For most cakes, the act of cutting is merely the end of the beginning; with Cullen's it is the beginning of the end. What he looks for in the sponge is consistency, structural integrity, colour – the contrast of the interior with the outside is a key part of the reveal.
'I very rarely make them myself any more,' he says. 'I order them in big sheets. With a lot of my work being for social media predominantly, then moved on elsewhere, I need to guarantee that consistency with the texture. They always need to suffice for being eaten, too, but the priority is the look.' He uses a company called Sweet Success, from which he orders large slabs of Genoese sponge.
It's two discs of this sponge that I begin with as I set about making my pizza. Using a knife to score a circle around the top of one, I scrape out a layer with a spoon. Then it's a matter of chiselling around the edges, on the ridge that will become the crust and on the underside, until they're rounded. 'A main thing with illusions,' says Cullen, 'is people always notice if the cake hits the surface flat, so you want some shadowing underneath.'
I make dark and white chocolate ganaches with chocolate melted in the microwave and cream, vigorously stirred. We apply the dark chocolate ganache to the top of the base cake as adhesive, add some sugar syrup to keep it moist, then spread the white chocolate all over to form a base level. It goes in the fridge to set.
While we press out discs of red sugar paste to craft into pepperoni, Cullen tells me about how he ended up with this curious gig. He grew up in Birmingham, where his dad worked at the bus garage but did magic at the weekends. His mum was a learning mentor at a primary school: illusion and education in the blood. He has an older sister, a performing arts teacher, who was into dance, but Cullen's priority was art. He drew on anything. Graffiti got him into trouble at school.
'I couldn't stop,' he says. 'I always wanted to be a painter, an artist, have work in the Tate galleries. But it's so competitive, that world.' Instead, he was working as a tattoo artist when he fell into conversation with a customer's mother about sugarcraft and started making cakes on the side. He had a day job as a graphic designer when he decided to go full-time into cakes in 2016. One of the first cakes he was proud of, still a favourite today, was of horror character Annabelle.
'My mum was obsessed with horror films,' he says. 'And she was my number-one cheerleader. Anything I would have done, she'd have said I was the best at it. Unfortunately, she passed away two years ago. It's one of the reasons I'm so excited about the book. For her, a book had more substance than TV or any of the other things I was doing. When she died, I thought, 'I have to do the book now.''
With the ganache chilled, it's time to decorate our pizza cake, which means sugar paste and food colouring. True to his technique of building the objects as they are in real life, Cullen has pre-coloured some paste to look like raw pizza dough. I roll it out thin and drape it over the base, tucking it in to create the rounded edges that are so important. Using a wire brush and some kitchen foil we roughen the edges of the dough: shiny surface textures are a giveaway.
At last, it's time to paint, when Cullen's artistic prowess really starts to show. Using browns and yellows we darken the edges of the dough to replicate the deeper brown of the edges of a pizza. Red colouring, textured with cake crumbs, makes the tomato sauce. For the cheese, more ganache, browned with a real blowtorch. Dark crumbs for black pepper. More dark brown where the edges of the pepperoni would have burned in the oven. 'What separates the really good illusions is going to that extra level,' Cullen says. 'Different colours, different textures.'
All of a sudden, my cake looks distinctly pizza-ish. It's only taken four hours and help from the world's leading practitioner. Contrary to usual advice about spoiling the magic, it's satisfying to see the illusion take shape. 'I do it myself,' he says. 'I'll step away and I'll be giddy. You'll be heading down the road and wondering if you're going the right way. Then there's a switch point where you think, 'Yes, it did work!''
After the book, Cullen has his eye on a TV programme. This time, his own creation. 'I think the thing I offer is that I'm in touch with normal people,' he says. 'I want to be the best in the world, but I also don't want to be out of touch. It's art at the end of the day – we're supposed to be enjoying it. There's a lot going on in the world, and we're making cakes. Any time I see someone crying on TV because their cake hasn't risen, I think 'calm down'. Don't let a hobby get ruined.'
Decoration complete, Cullen fashions a pizza box so I can take my creation home. 'A pizza?' my five-year-old daughter asks when I show it to her back in London. We cut into it. 'Cake!' she says, with delight.
