In June 2024, I volunteered at the National Film & Television School (NFTS) in Beaconsfield as an Art Department assistant building/decorating the set and making props. I was asked to make a cake based on a reference image which needed to be used in a shot where the main character smudges the icing. Here’s how I made the cake.

The reference image I was provided showed a large, rectangular, white cake with decorative piped icing on all corners and additional piped decoration on the top with a border of fresh strawberries. The structure, decorative corner icing and strawberries were what I was asked to replicate.

I started by building the shape by stacking layers of Polystyrene, securing them together with expanding foam.

The block was coated in polyfilla and smoothed with a palette knife, as real buttercream frosting would be, to give the same texture

A piping bag was filled with polyfilla and a wide nozzle used to pipe all of the corners. A batch of real white buttercream was made to colour match a paint shade, which was then applied to the entire cake.

Plaster casts of real strawberries were taken using an alginate mould. Casting several strawberries at once made the process faster as well as giving natural variety to the shapes and sizes.

Acrylic paint wash was used to seal the plaster before the bolder colour could be added. The strawberries were varnished to give them a shine, then the seeds painted over the varnish so they remained matt.

The strawberries were glued in place, as they did not need to be moved as part of the shot.

For the shot to smudge the icing, a recessed panel was cut out of the top of the cake to prevent the whole top of the cake needing to be reset for each take; the recess could be filled with actual or fake icing and reset as needed.