Edible Masterpieces, raising money for art, it's a piece of cake!

Last week I organised my first ever fundraising activity at work, raising money for the ArtFund. The ArtFund helps museums and galleries throughout the UK acquire works of art, supports the sharing of collections and campaigns to keep important works of art on public display. As a former art student this is something close to my heart, plus, their fundraising campaign 'edible masterpieces' featured cakes, so was also a good opportunity to stuff my face, art and food, what's not to like?! Deciding what to bake was quite difficult and I finally opted for the 4th Plinth, currently featuring the fantastic Hahn/Cock by Katharina Fritsch. The 4th Plinth is a 'spare' plinth on Trafalgar Square and features a changing piece of contemporary art. Hahn/Cock is my favourite so far, it is fantastically eye catching and if you are in London and haven't seen it yet, you simply must. Building the plinth cake itself was reasonably easy (I opted for a three tiered spiced orange and chocolate cake) but the icing was much harder. Rather than smother the cake in heavy sugar icing I went for a lighter mascarpone version with orange zest and a little icing sugar but this was really difficult to stick to the cake. After several attempts (with much joking... fnarr, fnarr) at moulding the blue cockerel from marzipan, fondant icing and a bottle of blue food colouring I gave up and cheated with a plastic one knocked up from some contraband from the stationery cupboard.

My colleagues surpassed themselves too with a cake version of David Hockney's 'A Bigger Splash' ...

...and a cute tin of Andy Warhol inspired banana cupcakes.

We also had a surprising late submission from another colleague, who recreated a photo of a dying cancer cell in M&Ms and chocolate biscuit. It was surprisingly accurate if a little macabre!

I asked my colleagues to donate whatever they wanted for a slice (or three) of any of the cakes into my homemade collection box and was expecting to make about £10 and just have a little fun but raised £55 in total, which is amazing. There was also very little left of any of the cakes so all in all I think this was a success. If you are considering doing this, go ahead, it really was great fun.