After visiting Cake International at Manchester’s Event City recently, I was blown away by the entries, in particular this ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ Cake. All the entries are identified by a number alone, so after spending most of the weekend trying to work out how anyone could be so talented to produce such a work of art, I was determined to find out more.
Thanks to a bit of digging around online, I discovered that the cake – along with a gold medal and 2nd place in the category of “A Decorative Exhibit” belongs to Emma Ball. Emma (31) is a manager at Richard’s Cakes in Urmston, Manchester and also came away with 1st place and a further gold medal for her unbelievably detailed work on the ‘How to Train your Dragon’ piece.
Emma went to Catering College from school and has been working for the past 16 years at Richard’s Cakes. She works on all aspects, but particularly enjoys decorating and modelling and for her numerous award winning cakes, she has taken inspiration from animated films such as Toy Story, Tangled, Ratatouille and Batman.
In line with the competitions’ regulations, Emma often uses ‘dummy’ cakes, so that she is able to highlight her skill of cake decoration and modelling. The cakes for this year’s Cake International took Emma 6 weeks to complete and she will be back for more in November at Cake International, Birmingham!
In the meantime, Emma is continuing her work at Richard’s – where she also holds modelling classes – and she is writing her first book. She hinted that she is one of the many professional cake decorators working on an exciting project for Cake & Bake 2014. I’m looking forward to finding out what that may be when I visit (and enter a competition myself) in a couple of weeks!
Thank you Emma, for taking the time to chat with me, and good luck from Bakes, Cakes and Eats for all your upcoming projects.
