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A 14-year aviation tradition has snowballed into a cut-throat arms race of artistic prowess, baking, physics, lobbying, and marketing.
Key points:
- A unique cake is baked every time a new air route is opened as a marketing tool
- An industry website has judged about 7,000 cakes since 2007
- The publisher reckons a good (or dismal) cake can make or break a route
While airports and airlines are focused on profits, service, and safety, it turns out they all secretly want to win a prize for the best cake too.
The Cake of the Week, run by UK-based aviation industry website Anna.ero, has been awarded about 750 times since the competition began in 2007.
An estimated 7,000 cakes costing thousands of dollars have challenged for the honour, including a 16 kilogram creation by Darwin cake artist Tenny Russo, which took out the weekly prize in June.
'You've got to have a cake'
Website publisher Paul Hogan says the hard-fought competition began during a Route of the Week competition, when airlines routinely sent in photos of launch parties celebrating their new routes.
Supplied: anna.aero
)Aside from the dignitaries and the speeches, it seemed there was always one common theme in the photos — fancy cakes.
"So we launched Cake of the Week – and soon everyone wanted the cake award and didn't care about the new Route of the Week award," Hogan says.
"Everybody says now when you launch a route "you've got to have a cake. And you've got to stamp your local community on it'."
Supplied: anna.aero
)High stakes cakes
All of the world's famous icons have seemingly been featured in fondant.
Supplied: anna.aero
)"The biggest cake I remember was TAM's Rio to Frankfurt launch in 2010. The route was a great success," Hogan says.
Hogan's favourite cake was baked by his wife Stacy over three weeks for the launch of the Easyjet London to Moscow route. All the passengers and crew had a slice.
"My four-year-old daughter was trying to help bake it. God knows what she put in it," he said.
"But nobody died."
Don't mention the mince pies
One outstanding culinary failure is still fresh in Hogan's mind.
A small airport once produced some mince pies for a route opening ceremony.
"They looked like they had been bought in a garage on the way to the route launch," he says.
"They looked dismal. I didn't taste them. But they were really floppy and miserable."
"Our least favourite are the cakes with printed icing. You can laser print any design onto a cake," he says.
"It's lazy and they never win."
Supplied: anna.aero
)Not the UN
Judging isn't exactly a model of democratic fairness.
"We are extremely shallow and vain — we go purely on looks," Hogan says.
Sometimes the decision comes down to a people's choice popularity contest.
Supplied: anna.aero
)"Anyone can vote and if it goes out on Twitter it can go nuts," Hogan says.
Southwest Airlines' 2013 Tampa to Memphis route Elvis Presley cake earned a record 7708 votes via social media campaigns.
The baking responsibility normally falls to the airport, but everyone stands to gain.
"In cases of a dispute we have a foolproof fair resolution mechanism — we always side with the airport that spends the most money on advertising," he says.
Some airports have even pushed ethical boundaries in public votes.
"The CEO of one airport, or rather his team, lobbied me to rig the vote, but so did the other airport," he says.
But at the end of the day, great baking trumped unethical practices.
Supplied: The Chantilly Kitchen
)Sugar glider
Chantilly Kitchen cake artist Tenny Russo was honoured, but bemused, to win the Cake of the Week honour for her Darwin to Canberra vintage tea towel map-style cake after the route launch in June.
Supplied: Darwin International Airport
)The sugar plane slides on a wire above the map on a hollow lollipop stick through the fuselage.
"The aeroplane would turn upside down initially," says Russo, who was commissioned by Darwin Airport to create the cake.
"My husband actually came up with the idea of having this little (weighted) flag across the bottom with the DRW and CBR codes. It worked."
Bragging rights
Darwin icons featured on Russo's winning cake included a crocodile, a barramundi, a jetski, a sunset, and a tiny bowl of laksa, which alone took her all night to perfect.
Supplied: Darwin International Airport
)Canberra featured ski slopes, vineyards, the Royal Australian Mint, and the Floriade festival.
The creation was 8kg cake, 4kg ganache, 4kg fondant, all on a 1m-wide board.
Bruce Dale, aviation development analyst at Darwin Airport, says he knew he was on to a winner with Russo's sweet treat.
"The 'runway credit' we get from winning Cake of the Week is certainly something which is boasted about in the networking sessions," he says.