I wanted to first thank Candace Chand for inviting me into the Festival of Lights collaboration. I am feeling loads of gratitude for being included alongside a lovely team of sugar artists. See all the cakes here: http://goo.gl/8dCph4

The piece I chose to recreate in sugar was the Goddess Lakshmi. She sits on an 8” chocolate cake, carved with an exaggerated bevel and ganached. The top half was then covered with a layer of modelling chocolate petals painted in edible gold, and the bottom half with modelling chocolate mosaics in two different shades. The Goddess herself is made from modelling chocolate and hand painted with pale gold food approved pure lustre by Caroline’s Sugar Art Services.

All the jewelled detailing on her outfit was created using a variety of piping tips to either emboss or punch out. No effort was wasted as you can see her belt and trouser details made use of the punched out offcuts. The elephants and owl are totally hand sculpted.

What took the longest, funnily enough, were the golden coins, which were punched out modelling chocolate. I wanted all the texture to be uniform so it was worth the extra effort. I also wanted to have coins spilling from her hand, as illustrated in pictures of the Goddess – so I teased the idea of this with the help of a thin strip of acetate.

The final piece was mounted on a large cake board to accommodate the candles which I placed around her.