Who says art and food are mutually exclusive? Food artist, cake sculptor, and graduate of the National Baking School in London Michelle Wibowo has created a colossal portrait of Prince William and baby George using 1500 Toblerone bars. The edible installation measured an impressive 12 by eight feet and was commissioned by the chocolate company to mark the Duke of Cambridge’s first Father’s Day as a dad.
The work came together using 16,075 individual chocolate triangles; Wibowo alternated between dark, milk, and white chocolate pieces to render light and shadows. It took “a long time to map out the exact location for each tiny piece of chocolate to create a recognizable image,” the artist told the Daily Mail, “but the hardest process was trying not to eat the Toblerone along the way.”
The over-sized portrait, of a photo of the William and his son visiting a Sydney Zoo this past April, was completed over 100 man hours, but this seems like a modest figure relative to some of Wibowo’s previous works.
In 2014, in commemoration of the 450th anniversary of Michelangelo’s death, the food artist spent nearly 200 hours creating a replica of his Sistine Chapel masterpiece, The Creation of Adam. The piece employed 10,000 marshmallows and half a billion cake sprinkles.
Wibowo sketched the entire picture by pencil first and then filled in the drawing with multi-colored frosting before sprinkling the marshmallows and cake decorations on top.
Some of her other edible artworks include a life-size, life-like baby cake, displayed at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2011; a life-size cake of the Queen of England that won gold at the Culinary Olympics in Germany in 2012; and a Beyoncé-inspired Oreo Pop cake commissioned by Oreo.
Watch a video of Wibowo at work