Botticelli painted cakes

I made these two following painted cakes as a tribute to Renaissance, taking inspiration from both Botticelli’s painting (Villa Lemmi fresco and The Fortitude) and italian majolica painting.
I used the Deco Biscuit technique for the nude sponge cake with baked patterns which lies underneat the “ceramic” hand-painted broken tiles made with fondant. I painted the tiles with powder colours and food grade pure alcohol, using a watercolour veiling technique that allows a very shaded final effect through a series of very diluted overlappings, then broke them and scratched them roughly with a knife.
The square cake entered the Glamouritaliancakes competition held at SIGEP in Rimini in January 2014 along with a real cake version of it and got first price for aesthetic and third price overall.
The rounded one entered the Cake International Competition held in Birmingham in November 2014 and got a gold medal.

The painting process:

Here is the official description with historical details:

An “Entremet” in Renaissance time was an elaborate form of entertainment dish, common among the nobility and upper middle class in Europe, that marked the end of a serving of courses. It was usually brightly colored and flavored with exotic and expensive spices, but most of all it presented food shaped into elaborated allegorical scenes of Gods, often packed with symbolism of power and regality. The Entremets would take the shape of various types of “surprising illusion foods”, such as elaborate models of castles made from edible material or redressed cooked animals like peacocks and swans. Therefore, from a historical point of view it can be rightly said that Entremets represent the origin of contemporary decorative cake design.
The Italian painter Botticelli himself frequently devoted his production to the problems of perspective and in particular to “Anamorphism”, which basically is a game of optical illusion in which an image is projected onto a surface in a distorted way, making the original subject recognizable only by looking at the image from a specific point of view (from greek ἀναμόρφωσις = reconstructed form). Exactly like in 1470 “Fortress” painting.
However, for modern pastry chefs, an Entremet is a multi-layered mousse based and creamy cake with various complementary flavors and varying textural contrasts, that make it a “semifreddo” style dessert.
Indeed, the Italian Renaissance Entremet cake here presented as been designed to be an up-to-date version of it, yet modeled on an ancient recipe of Maestro Martino of Como, author of “De Arte Coquinaria” (XV cent.) – the first italian manual of culinary art – that plays between present and tradition, on what appears and what is behind/inside. That’s why it takes advantage of the surprise decorative effect of the “biscuit joconde imprimé” tecnique, a handmade “printed” cake created through coloured batters designed with piping bags before cooking, that reveal themselves under the surface of the worn out “ceramic” tiles in painted sugarpaste, as a tribute to the Renaissance italian majolica. The original recipe called for “cacio, cerase et rose roscie” cheese, black cherries and red roses that have been converted into a modern entremet of ricotta mousse, with an insert of rose gelatin and a cherry bavarois, spiced with ginger and poppy seeds. An already experimented recipe, that makes this design especially suitable for the semifreddo italian style cakes, that usually need to be built with pastry rings and conserved in fridge till the very last moment.