The Great Brideshead Bake Off...
Crumbs! They’re rebuilding TV’s legendary stately home – with gingerbread It’s bigger than a car, will take ten bakers two weeks to make – and cost £20,000 But is it a ‘let them eat cake’ folly that will end in tiers for new chatelaine?
IT’S a cake that even Marie Antoinette might have considered flamboyant: a giant £20,000 concoction of gingerbread and icing representing one of the most famous stately homes in Britain.
Measuring a whopping 13ft by 10ft, the giant confection will depict Castle Howard – where the classic 1981 TV drama Brideshead Revisited was filmed – complete with intricate columns, its trademark dome and some of the architectural features found in its 10,000acre grounds.
The cake, more elaborate than anything seen on the Great British Bake-Off, will form the centrepiece of the estate’s Christmas festivities, going on display to the paying public from the middle of next month.
Some say its extravagance reflects the change of regime at the stunning 18th Century country home that has followed a dramatic family upheaval. As The Mail on Sunday revealed a year ago, Simon Howard, 59, who had presided over the estate for 30 years, was served with an eviction order and has now moved out with his wife Rebecca and their family, making way for older brother Nicholas, 64, and his wife Victoria, a former chief executive of publishing giant Harper-Collins.
It is the new chatelaine who has ordered the giant cake, sparking criticisms it was needlessly ostentatious – especially after the estate had to sell £12million of artwork last year to ‘preserve and nurture’ Castle Howard for the future. Sam Taylor, editor of highsociety magazine The Lady, said: ‘It is an extravagance. When you already have a perfectly good house made out of bricks, why have it made in biscuits as well?’ Further criticism has come because the cake has been made not by a local North Yorkshire baker, but by London ‘architectural foodsmiths’ Bompas and Parr. The firm boasts that it makes ‘immersive flavour-based experiences ranging from an inhabitable cloud of gin and tonic to the world’s first multi-sensory fireworks’.
It will take a team of ten two weeks to make the Castle Howard leviathan, after which it will be carefully transported the 200 miles to North Yorkshire.
Phil Magson, boss of The Leaf And Loaf baker in the village of Welburn, less than two miles from Castle Howard, said the estate should have used a local firm to prepare the cake.
He said: ‘I’m surprised because I think Castle Howard gets most of its things locally. It’s a selling point, for one thing.
‘You would have thought they could have found someone local to have done it, even though it is a specialist job.’
The elaborate design will be the centrepiece of Castle Howard’s Christmas display.
And in a separate development, a festive fair that has been held at the mansion in aid of the NSPCC for the past 15 years has been moved this year. The event, which raises thousands of pounds, will now be held at nearby Duncombe Park.
As well as the main 154-room house – built over the course of 100 years from 1699 – the gingerbread version of Castle Howard will include architectural features such as the Temple of the Four Winds and the Mausoleum.
The real Castle Howard – home to a magnificent art collection including ancient sculptures and works by Old Masters such as Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough – attracts more than 250,000 visitors every year, and has been the seat of the Howard family for ten generations.
A spokesman for the estate declined to comment on the cost of the gingerbread model.