Fashion Cakes Serve as a 'Challenge'
A few looks from Alice + Olivia's Fall 2009 collection that served as inspiration for the Fashion Cakes Challenge (Photos courtesy Alice + Olivia)
I’ll admit that I am completely addicted to Food Network, and I love the shows that involve competitive tasks and eliminations a la “Project Runway.”
On last night’s episode of “Food Network Challenge”—the show in which cake designers and artists are tasked with creating over-the-top, beautiful confections in a matter of hours—the theme of the show was “Fashion Cakes.”
I don’t automatically think of cake when I think of fashion, but fashion designers are known to whip up deliciously decadent frocks that look good enough to eat.
The challenge for four cake designers—Joshua John Russell, Jennifer Matsubara, Michelle Doll and Alexandria Pellegrino—was to create cakes that best represented the Fall 2009 collection of contemporary label Alice + Olivia.
The cake artists even went down to the studio of Alice + Olivia designer Stacey Bendet to check out the goods in person. Bendet’s idea behind the Fall 2009 collection was uptown girl meets downtown girl and how the pieces in the collection can be mixed together and worn by both.
The surprise challenge for the cake artists was that they would be paired with models as assistants who were unskilled in cake making. “I don’t think models even eat cake,” Russell said.
Each cake designer took various elements of the Alice + Olivia collection into account when designing their cakes—from the architecture, construction and textiles of the pieces to the prints, colors and fabrics.
Amina Akhtar, fashion editor of Nymag.com, served as guest judge and looked to see how the competitors best executed their interpretation of the collection, which she described as preppy and punk.
