Question: Is it a cake or latte? | Select | norfolkdailynews.com - Norfolk Daily News

I was hooked the first time I watched a video of a person cutting into what looked like a hot cup of latte.

There it was, a large china cup with a latte that had a swirl of cream on the top, except it wasn’t a cup of latte. In the video, a person brought a cake knife into the picture and calmly cut what wasn’t a cup of latte but was actually an intricately decorated cake.

I found out that I’m not the only one who loves to see what cakes someone is going to disguise next. It’s like magic.

I watched as a beautiful peach laying on a countertop was placed on a cutting board and sliced open to reveal that it was actually cake. I don’t know how they do it.

There is the video of a can of seltzer ready to grab and toss back for a refreshing swallow except here comes that cake knife and, no, it can’t be, yes, the knife cuts the can and it’s a cake. There are three layers in the cake each separated by thick chocolate frosting.

So who is making these unbelievable edible objects? It seems as if some people have a lot of COVID time on their hands because it takes hours to make these cakes. I think it’s a prolonged ordeal when I make a pan of rice krispie bars.

In looking a little deeper into what it takes to make these hyper-realistic cakes, these food artists first have to plan what shape of pans to bake the variety of cakes they’ll need for their desired shape. A person making a turkey that looks exactly like Thanksgiving turkey ready for carving had to bake a cake in an oval pan and another two cakes in rectangular pans.

Once they have these cakes stacked between layers of icing they take a carving knife and carve on that cake like they are Michelangelo carving a stone statue. It may take them two hours just to make the right shape of cake.

Add-on pieces are made out of cake pop dough, which is cake crumbs pressed together with frosting and attached to the main cake with edible sugar glue. Then they lay a sheet of fondant over the whole thing and shape it to look like what the final cake will look like. Using an air brush in many cases, they decorate the cake.

This is not your grandmother’s cake.

My grandmother never spent hours on a cake just so it would look like the perfect lettuce salad or, heaven forbid, the exact replica of a roll of toilet paper.

I can’t see me making any hyper-realistic cake soon, but there is something really satisfying about watching someone knife through what looks like a carton of eggs but is actually just a minutely decorated cake.

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