Cake village

October 21, 2019 12:55 PM

Lynn Nolan explains: “All of the buildings, bar the Miner’s Arms and Eyam Tea Rooms, are made from individual bricks which are no bigger than an inch long. There are lights inside the buildings, which allow you to see the glasses in the pub and the sweets in the shop through windows, which are made out of gelatine sheets.” Lynn spent three months recreating Eyam (pronounced “Eem”) using over 50 different cakes and eight litres of whisky, baked by residents of the Derbyshire village (tinkly music video). How to make a church. Previous constructions include Youlgrave, made out of Christmas cake, icing and marzipan, and Bethlehem, made out of 36 whisky-soaked cakes.
posted by Wordshore (12 comments total)

People who spotted "PlagueVillage" in the tags and went "wait WHAT?" - this act of self-sacrifice is what Eyam is famous for.
posted by Catseye at 1:34 PM on October 21, 2019 [15 favorites]

I think I'm rather safe in going ahead and assuming this is where Wordshore actually lives and everything is made out of cake, whiskey and sugar.

Also why am I suddenly salivating so much that it hurts? I just ate dinner, damn you Wordshore! *shakes crumby fist*
posted by loquacious at 4:43 PM on October 21, 2019 [3 favorites]

I think I'm rather safe in going ahead and assuming this is where Wordshore actually lives and everything is made out of cake, whiskey and sugar.

You forgot cheese.
posted by briank at 5:35 PM on October 21, 2019 [7 favorites]

i want to go there i want to be inside the tiny cake houses
posted by poffin boffin at 7:36 PM on October 21, 2019 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Couple comments deleted. If you're not into the whimsical cake thing, that's ok, but please just go read about something else.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:57 PM on October 21, 2019 [4 favorites]

Mrs Nolan added: “I have a lot of people coming up to me and talking about my cake but to be honest they’re Bakewell and Eyam Community Transport’s cakes.

“I want to help them keep going so they can help people who have nobody to take them to hospital or shopping.

“It’s important as sometimes it’s the only human contact these people have.”

Kudos to her! It's so great when you can combine a skill/hobby you have a passion for and a good cause.
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 9:03 PM on October 21, 2019 [4 favorites]

Since fruitcakes are the base and marzipan the outer cover, these should last for years.

If my house or shop was so grandly reproduced then I'd be compelled to bid whatever it took to win it. I can just imagine the fun it would be to bid for someone else's place and see what happens... they either donate a whole bunch of *dough* or you win it and can have all kinds of fun with it.

This whole scenario gives way for an entire town involved in madcap wordshorian adventures.

Yes. I forsee a big future for this little town.
posted by mightshould at 3:03 AM on October 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

I first saw this on a Reddit community named ABoringDystopia, which is ostensibly about things like intersections between precarity, surveillance and late capitalist malaise, though has largely been taken over by people who seem to compete on how much they can assert is dystopian, and anything other than Fully Automated Luxury Communism and/or some sort of pre-technological Rousseauvian eden is literally a nightmarish Orwellian hellscape. In this case, the Cake Village was dystopian because it exists in a world in which some people were going hungry.
posted by acb at 8:22 AM on October 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

I can't help but feel these sculptures get no benefit from being psuedo-edible. Fondant isn't really edible, you *can* eat it, but you shouldn't and nobody would want to, at that point, almost anything not outright poisonous is edible. These are great sculptures, but it seems like they'd just as well be made in any other kind of clay or sculpting material. If the entire cake and food elements are to be composed of fondant, which is for all intents and purposes, an inedible clay, why bother hiding baked goods underneath where they aren't visible and don't seem to inform the work at all. I am no stranger to using odd materials as paint and sculptural medium, I still do a bit of spice and mud-paint and toy with sugar-paint, ahhh fuck, I also literally use cake piping tools in my paintings/sculptures...

Okay, so maybe I just fuckin hate fondant and couldn't see past it. An artist using materials familiar to her isn't a problem at all and the deliciousness of art isn't very important. Not to mention, what's the best case scenario for non-art fruitcake? What even is a fruitcake when it's not art?
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:39 AM on October 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

it's weird that ppl would choose to focus their ire on cakes made by a single person for charity rather than the literal tons of food thrown away by corporate chain supermarkets every single day.
posted by poffin boffin at 6:04 PM on October 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

However, it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Lynn, with disaster striking when one of the centre pieces of the village, Eyam Hall, was smashed into pieces as she was adding the final touches.

“It was the first time I’ve ever dropped a cake – I was reaching across and knocked it off the table.

“I’d finished constructing it, icing it and the whole thing was broken!

“My husband, wisely, said ‘I’m taking the dog out for a walk’ and I just sat there and had a little cry.”

Luckily, the fruit cake fanatic had more cakes in reserve which were set aside for a school fete and got straight back to work to rebuild the centrepiece.

I can't build villages out of cakes, but if I could, this is the sort of thing I would beat myself up about for weeks, but that would be tempered by the fact I was in a house that had lots of fruit cake in reserve.

Step 3: The wiring

Notice the little lights in the windows of the finished article? They were put there with the help of a man named David Thompson, who supplied Lynn with electrical wire an miniature bulbs. They were inserted into through cake by carving out bits of the marzipan. “It’s a bit like doing your wiring by tunnelling through the plaster,” Lynn explains.

I'd like to amend that to "tunnelling though delicious, almond-y plaster."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:16 PM on October 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

I can't help but feel these sculptures get no benefit from being psuedo-edible.

I agree, but some folks will always be "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!" about making stuff out of odd materials. Lord knows there's a fancy hotel in SF where they do a giant castle (almost) every year out of tons of fondant, for the same logic and reasoning.

I mean, it's weird that nobody eats this stuff, but....*shrug?*
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:08 AM on October 23, 2019