A wedding cake is perhaps the most crucial element to a cake, after the bride and the groom themselves. A ruined cake is a ruined wedding, but it has to be the perfect event if your cake looks like a castle right out of a Disney movie. A bakery in Jakarta, Indonesia that goes by the name LeNovelle Cake bakes incredibly detailed cakes, sculpturing castles, cathedrals, and pagodas out of cake and sugar. The magnificent sugar architecture pieces by the bakery go as high as 7 meters and cost thousands of dollars.
The family run LeNovelle Cake was founded in 1993 by Susanti Sunardjie and Ricky Riyadi. They began to sell wedding cakes in 2004, and the bakery has become world-famous for their intricate enormous cake designs. Each cake rises meters high and takes up to a month in the making, sometimes employing 24 people working 12 hours every day, just to complete one cake.
Tiffany Riyadi, who is the owners’ daughter, talked about the details and effort that is put into each cake saying, “We take on several projects at a time but three weeks to one month is what we average on when making our large cakes. We love putting in personal touches that show our clients their cake is truly made for them and is all about them.”
The best and the most ostentatious of their creations included a nine-tiered Japanese pagoda and a $50,000 cake studded with 100 diamond rings. Some of the cakes are fitted with electric lights to give off a more realistic view. “For the interior lights, we hollow out the structure and install a small light bulb in it. Depending on the request we can then connect the cable to a battery, or simply connect the wires to a power outlet. For lights that wrap around the cake, we used a normal Christmas lights and hide the cables between our sugar flowers or crystals as needed. Afterward, we cover the cakes in icing fondant and carry on with the decoration as normal,” said Tiffany.
The craftsmen do not miss out on any architectural details of the castles and cathedrals. All the turrets, pillars, and balconies are beautifully created and coated with fondant and sugar flowers. The most popular of the designs are inspired by the Cinderella castle and Elsa’s castle from Frozen. The pictures of the cakes on the Bakery’s Instagram account look spectacular but according to Tiffany, they “do not show the true scale and enormity of the cake themselves.”
A cake going up to meters high weighs dozens of pounds, and that brings us to the questions of transporting the gigantic cakes. The cake obviously can not fit into a regular sized car or even a small van, so the bakery carries them in trucks and sometimes one truck is just not enough. “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. The largest of our cakes required five trucks and eight man hours to assemble,” explained Tiffany Riyadi.
Here is a good and bad news. The cake is only partially edible. No one can eat that much cake no matter how grand the wedding is. The base is made with cake, but the other detailed elements like the towers, arches, balconies are made of styrofoam and coated with sugar paste flowers. The bakery, however, claims they can make entirely edible cakes as well, but there have been no such orders yet, and the cost of such pieces is just too high.
The bakery now has two branches one in Jakarta and another in Bali. The cake prices begin at $5,000 and can go as high as you might like.