OUGD405 - Typogateaux : The Contest

 For our final brief before christmas we had to create a letter form or word out of cake. The cake would then be submitted, tried and scored by the principle. There was to be one winner from the entires.

We were allowed to work in teams ti split the work evenly. I chose to work in a team with Laura and Harrison. To start off we made a design sheet of all our ideas. When we were brainstorming we came up with some rather radical ideas like the leaning tower of type. We soon found that when it came down to bringing our ideas to life it was not as simple as we thought.

Harrison had the idea to create 'Helveticake', we really liked the play on words and after a few failed attempts at other ideas chose the simple but interesting 'Helveticake'.

We followed a simple sponge recipe but made a few adjustments such as adding black food colouring to make the cake look like it had been typed out on a computer.

Our ingredients

Our first attempt at one of our ideas went terribly wrong as the cake did not cook in the centre. We were very upset with this because we felt it was a strong idea. 

After failed attempts we filled a tray with blackened cake mix and left it to cook. This was the outcome.

Our first idea was to cover the cake in black icing so to make each letter sturdy. We tried this out but found it was still flimsy and wouldn't stand up properly.

The way we overcame this was to bake another slab of black cake and cover it with raspberry jam. We then stuck the two slabs together like a victoria sponge.

On the computer we layer out the word 'Helveticake' to find out which point size would work the best. We ended up working with 250pt. 

After printing the letters out as templates we got to work cutting them out of the cake. 

This was a very hard job but Harrison and Laura pulled it off beautifully.

Our finished product laid out on the table at college.

Unfortunately we did not win but we enjoyed the process very much and will return next year.