Like a long creamy train, India’s longest eggless chocolate cake rested at Forum Vijaya Mall, much to the delight of the young and the old who visited the mall on October 2. The cake, themed ‘Namma Chennai. Namma Pride’, was created by The French Loaf, the bakery wing of Oriental Cuisines Private Limited (OCPL), as part of the Joy of Giving Week. The cake was created to extend their support to charity organisations – The Child and Karpagavalli Vidyalaya.
Narendra Malhotra, CEO, OCPL, expressed his joy in giving back to the society by thanking the vendors who supported them for ingredients, the French Loaf team who had to spend four nights to get the 1,000 kg cake done and the 300 children from The Madras Seva Sadan Group of Institutions and Lady Andal, whose sketches have been adapted on the cake.
He said, “It’s amazing that we are able to help HIV +ve children from The Child and the children of Karpagavalli Vidyalaya, who plan to help make technology accessible to their students through the money. This deed, coupled with the opportunity to showcase our own ability, just makes it perfect.”
The cakes, which ran for 100 metres, was reduced to half its size in a matter of hours, with chefs already packing it in boxes for people who had made the registrations. The cake was sold for `1,500 per kg , each having a photo of the Ripon building, the Labour Statue or Tidal Park. There were also sketches of a sun between the mountains, a huge dolphin and Gandhiji with his charkha, among many others.
“The sketches were printed on the cake using an edible A4 photosheet,” said Boopesh Pichaimani, corporate chef, The French Loaf, Le Chocolatier. “A group of 26 chefs took exactly 285 man hours to complete it,” he added. In total, there were 100 people involved in the baking and assembling of the masterpiece.
The cake, which tasted as delicious as it looked, was made of 600 kg of chocolate mixes, 300 kg of dark chocolate, 100 kg of white chocolate, 1,000 kg of icing sheets and 50 kg of fruit gels. “Every stage of its preparation was monitored and we purposefully delayed the making to make it as fresh as possible,” says the chef.
This is the third time The French Loaf is creating a 100 metre cake. However, the themes for last year and the before were ‘Ilaiyarajaa’ and ‘75 years of Indian Cinema respectively’.