Cake crusaders: TMC meet The Great Cake Escape

words and photographs by Sticky Toffee Pudding

What’s this I see? A trail of brightly coloured treats populating the urban landscape? Why it can only be The Great Cake Escape! Nikki Shaill and Lorraine Williams, aka Cherry Bakewell and Fondant Fancy, have been delighting the guerrilla arts scene with their edible treats for almost two years now. Having met as young students at Sheffield university the pair have banded together to unleash an array of freedom loving cakes on the avenues of our city. 

What started off as a celebratory project for Nikki’s birthday has grown into a delightful mishmash of events, projects and lots of cake, much to the girls’ own surprise. They had never intended to keep baking cakes; rather it just sort of happened, due in large part to the positive responses they received. Ever willing to share their love of cake with fellow aficionados, I caught up with the generous pair on their most recent cake drop for a good old chat.

So what’s it all about then?

N: It’s about being outside in an urban environment and leaving little edible pieces of street art.

L: Basically we’ve put little cakes on the street with messages on them to cheer people up and to intrigue them and just for something a little less ordinary.

N: The idea is the great cake escape, lots of cakes escaped from the kitchen and liberated onto the streets.

So it’s just cakes?

L: Yep, and people can think of them what they will. They can take them with them, eat them, be amused by them or just read the flag and walk on. They’re just a little distraction really, that’s it. We’re not trying to flog anything; we’re not involved in some kind of marketing campaign. This is the point of it; the cakes.

What are your favourite cakes at the moment?

N: At the moment, mine is probably courgette cake. One of my flatmates makes amazing courgette cake with cream cheese frosting. It’s really moist, wet cake. And it’s courgette so you know you do feel like you’re getting part of your five a day!

L: I like walnut cake and fondant fancies, but I don’t really eat that much cake.

When making cakes do you lick the bowl?

N: Of course! Why wouldn’t you? I’ve actually got a really good spatula.

L: A spatula? That’s elegant, I just use my finger.

So how do you stop yourself from eating the cakes you bake? Do some go missing perhaps?

L: Yeah, there are already two less than we started out with today.

N: Often we’ll walk quite a long way so you know…

L: Our cake drops require a lot of exercise. We burn calories with all this walking!

N: And we have to climb up onto walls and reach into all these places…

L: And sometimes we have to skip across roads if there’s a car coming, and that burns even more calories!  Besides, I don’t think my body can function without E numbers.

But after making all those cakes don’t you ever get sick of them?

N: Yeah I do find that sometimes just the sight of all these cakes – it’s the last thing I want to eat. Sometimes we’ll do a couple hundred and just placing out two hundred cakes makes me never want another cake again! I just want something savoury.

So how long does it take to make 200 cakes?

L: Several hours.

N: We’ve got a lot faster now though. We’ve got our own process so we’re quicker than most people would be.

L: It’s the flags that take the longest. Making sure they all fit appropriately so that one side says eat me or take me and the other has the little message and the Myspace address. And then you’ve got to cut them and prick them onto cocktail sticks and make sure none of the letters are covered. I quite enjoy it though, I put the telly on.

What’s the most you’ve ever baked at one time?

L: Four hundred.

How long did that take?

L: We did it over a few days! It took us ages. I remember the flat was just full of cakes.

Where do you do your cake drops?

N: We’ve done Shoreditch a lot, because it’s contained and has lots of little streets, and because it’s still a little bit depressing but on the way up. The cakes look really good against that kind of background. We’ve also done Southbank…

L: New Cross, Brighton, Sheffield, Leeds, Cornwall oh and Camden. We haven’t done Bethnal Green yet.

N: Let’s do it today!

Any places overseas?

L: I don’t think we’ve yet to do any international cake drops.

N: Maybe because we haven’t been on holiday.

Do your friends always expect you to make the cakes?

N: Yeah, but it’s nice to be able to. Once I did them for my friend’s hen weekend and that was fun. I put special little messages for her on them and then we did an actual treasure hunt and she was very happy with that.

L: I let Nikki do it I get out of it

Where did you learn how to bake?

N: From my mum when I was little.  Back then baking was one of the few things I could do without burning the house down! And I always liked the decorating bit best as it’s kind of like art, like painting on the cake. Still I don’t know any recipes. Every time I bake I have to ask someone or Google it!

Would you say you were quite dedicated to spend your Sunday afternoon placing cakes on the streets?

L: Yeah if by dedicated you mean we don’t really have much else to do!

N: Well we’re not really. I mean at one point we thought we would do two cake drops a month.

L: But it was a lot and we wore ourselves out quite a bit.

N: Then we started taking them to events and giving them out.

L: And we got caught up in trying to get those done. But we realised we hadn’t done anything on the streets in a bit so we thought we’d get back to the roots. We haven’t done it for a while though, like six months.

N: I think in a way we tried to stop. We’ve never had a direction and we never set out to do anything with it, so other people have kind of led us to where it’s gone. The people who’ve found the cakes have asked us to bring them to their events and that’s how we got into that. And then people have spotted us at these events and asked us to do more.

L: But it’s nice to do a cake drop after such a long time.

What sorts of cakes do you bake?

N: Sometimes we theme them but they’re always that little fairy cake size. We’ve done them with alcohol before, Easter themed, chocolate - everybody loves chocolate, Christmas themed with spices and cinnamon, carrot, and lemon ones I quite like a lot, but often they’re vanilla. It just depends; they take longer when I’m doing loads of different varieties.

And what sort do you have today?

N: They’re just plain vanilla. When they’re on the streets we tend to do more basic ones, it’s more about what they look like instead of what they’re gonna taste like.

L: When we started it just took so long and we spent so much time making them for the street, only for us to not even know what happened to them.

N: You make such an effort and sometimes a street sweeper can come along and bin them.

Are you ever tempted to just cheat and head to Tesco?

N: Yeah we cheat, I’ve had to cheat with today’s cos with all the things on this weekend I didn’t have the time. Whenever we take them to an event we always make them though, we always put the extra effort in.

And finally, what do you think the deal is with lesbians and cake?

(They both laugh)

L: It crops up so much doesn’t it?

N: I think maybe it’s just women and cake, or even people and cake. I think everyone loves cake. We do get a lot of innuendo though. People can sexualise cake and Lorraine’s unintentionally written some flags  that read like cake porn.

(Lorraine protests innocence)

L: Some have been intentionally mucky, like for the party at 333. The specification was to make them a little bit filthy. But some of the normal ones have been misconstrued as being a bit “innuendo-ee”.

For more images to tantalise your taste buds check out their Myspace page. And those of you who want a bit of cake action don’t forget The Great Cake Escape will be dolling out their treats at The Most Cake launch party this Saturday. Long live the cake!