Have you ever hesitated before cutting into a particularly beautiful-looking cake and thought, “Gosh, this almost looks too pretty to eat”? Well, an Indonesian bakery is taking that sentiment to a whole new level. LeNovelle Cake is creating wedding cakes so elaborate it’s unclear whether they’re food or sculpture.
Actually, they’re both. What started as a small family business in 1993 is now a booming specialty bakery, offering architectural cakes so detailed they boggle the mind. According to odditycentral.com, the cakes can be as tall as seven meters (almost 23 feet!), and weigh dozens of pounds.
The cakes can take up to 24 people, working 12 hours a day, to create. Even with this many people working such long hours, LeNovelle estimates three weeks to a month for each creation.
And the cost? Apparently, a bride and groom can expect to pay at least $5,000 for one of these cakes. But it could be as much as $500,000! But, looking at them, would you really expect to pay anything less?
The cakes are so large they don’t fit in a regular car or even a van, so the company uses trucks to transport them. Tiffany Riyadi, the daughter of the owners of LeNovelle says, “Usually we need two trucks to carry a structural cake. Otherwise they won’t fit through a normal car door. We will then have a team of staff to repair any damage during transportation, assemble the cake and sugar flowers and do the finishing touches.”
Some of these cakes even come with lighting! The bakery can create interior lights by installing a light bulb inside the hollowed out center of the cake. And they also offer exterior lights, created by winding Christmas lights around the base of the cake and hiding the wires behind sugar flowers and other decorations.
Disney fans have, no doubt, already spotted some similarities between these cakes and the castles in their favorite films. It’s not a coincidence. LeNovelle uses Cinderella’s castle and Elsa’s ice palace as inspiration for many of their cakes.
So, can you actually eat these cakes? Well, yes and no. Only the bases of the cakes are edible. The rest is created using styrofoam covered in fondant icing. Apparently, the bakery says they can make similar creations that are completely edible, but no one has been willing to pay the enormous price tag for a cake like that.
But, edible or not, it seems pretty certain that these cakes would be a crowd-pleaser at any wedding. In fact, they might upstage the bride!
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