11 Amazing, Weird and Wacky Food Sculptures
This giant cake (about 39 feet by 32 feet) is so big it set the record for the world’s largest cake sculpture and won an entry into the Guinness World Record book in November 2014. The cake produced 12,000 slices, which were offered to the general public in the U.K. in exchange for donations to a charity.
If you were in New York in June 2014, you could have seen (and maybe, if you dared, tasted a tiny piece of) “Meat Rushmore,” created by art director Alex Valhouli and Jack Link’s beef jerky company using 1,600 pounds of three different kinds of beef jerky. It took workers more than 1,400 hours over three weeks to complete the 13-foot-tall and 17-foot-wide “monument.”
Butter sculptures, an American tradition and a staple of every state and county fair worth its salt, have been around for a long time. One of the earliest examples of butter sculptures in the U.S. was a bas relief displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. This bust of President Barack Obama was done in 2012 in Chicago by two local artists.
Artist Liz Hickok created a full replica of San Francisco in 2012 using jelly of various colors. She’s since tackled other cities, including New York City, Scottsdale, Wilmington, Delaware and North Adams, Massachusetts. “I cast elaborate scale models of urban sites out of Jell-O, light them from below, and bring them to life with photography and video,” she says on her website.
This replica of New York City’s Times Square, made out of cheese, was sculpted by artists Marie Pelton and Jim Victor, who specialize in food sculptures. It was made exclusively for Castello Cheese’s NYC pop up store and displayed in June 2014.
This dragon was made with lemons and oranges during the 82nd Lemon Festival in Menton, France, which began on Feb. 14. More than 2,200 pounds of lemons and oranges are typically used to make displays during the festival, which picked the Chinese New Year as its theme this year.
Chicago Tribune
This sculpture of a bull was made using 250,000 beans and is located in the food hall of department store Selfridges in Birmingham in England – where the major commercial area is called the Bull Ring.
This portrait of Britain’s Kate and William took more than five weeks to create and 11,000 jelly beans. It was shown at the Cake Decorating, Chocolate and Sugarcraft Exhibition in England a few months before the 2011 royal wedding.
A Ukrainian baker opted to make his bride’s wedding dress himself – except that instead of fabric, he used 1,500 cream puffs to create the outfit, which weighed more than 20 pounds. Her crown, bouquet and necklace were made from caramelized sugar.
Going Green
PETA, the animal rights organization, has dressed up several women with vegetables, including Alyssa Milano, to promote vegetarianism, usually using the slogan, “Let vegetarianism grow on you.” In the U.K., it covered former British Big Brother star Chantelle Houghton with an outfit made entirely of lettuce.
PETA
Lady Gaga, herself a vegan, didn’t mean to make a statement against animal rights when she wore this dress, made of real meat, at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, but she certainly upset PETA. That didn’t stop her from winning eight VMAs that year.