Challenging! That’s what this cake was. In the brief I was given a few geological cross-sections and a subsurface structure map and then promptly let loose to create. And this is what happened.

The cake itself took three hours just to stack and carve, as it was done to mimic the geology in the brief, with lots of faultlines and stratigraphy! I also made the cake in such a way that people had a choice of the flavour they wanted:

Left side: chocolate cake with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream to represent layers or shales, mudstone and sandstone.

Middle and main structure: red velvet to represent the basement rock, with vanilla cake, lemon curd, and vanilla swiss meringue buttercream to represent the sandstones on top.

Right side: Chocolate brownie with white chocolate chips (to represent a conglomerate) with chocolate cake, dark chocolate ganache, caramel and more lots more ganache.

One of the pictures shows some of the “faulting” that I created internally with the last picture showing the hidden oil, aka chocolate sauce!

The semi-submersible drilling rig is almost all modeling chocolate. There are some skewer supports that mimic the real life structure, and the drilling floor is chocolate covered foam core. I even created a little silver drill so they could hunt for the oil. Everything else is edible. I think they had a bit of fun today while eating their cake.