It started with Mary Berry.
I had been asked to create a Fabergé-inspired showpiece for a large sugarcraft exhibition in London. This was 2015, Mary Berry was the guest of honour that year, and as it happened, she was turning eighty that week. The brief was open, the design was entirely up to me and I spent a long time thinking about what to make. I came across the Clover Leaf Fabergé egg made for Tsar Nicholas II in 1902, it is covered in thousands of tiny green clover leaves set in gold, and the whole surface of it has a kind of impossible intricacy that stops you in your tracks and draws you in. It was the layering that drew me to this particular Fabergé egg, layer upon layer of individually crafted detail, building into something that rewards the closer you look. I have come to understand over the years that this is what excites me as a cake maker, and what I am perhaps known for. Intricate detail, work that reveals itself gradually. It felt like the right tribute too. Mary Berry is widely regarded as the queen of cakes. Fabergé eggs were made for royalty. The connection seemed obvious once I’d seen it.
I made hundreds of individual hand-cut sugar clover leaves, each one outlined in gold, layered across the entire surface of the egg. I cut the egg in half and fixed it open so that the surprise inside was always visible — a tiny fairy sitting in the gold interior, holding an even tinier cupcake, a little nod to the magic of baking. Hand-painted portrait medallions are a recurring feature of the original Fabergé eggs, so it felt right to include one here. On the upper half, set into the clover leaf surface, was Mary Berry’s face, hand painted on sugar.
Getting the egg to the arena in one piece was an achievement in itself, but when I saw how it was received I could finally relax. The exhibition ended. The egg came home. I put it in a clear display case in the studio and got on with everything else.I thought that was the end of the story.
Some years later, Hannah came in for a consultation with her mum to design her wedding cake. She had a clear idea of what she wanted and was considering how many tiers she might like. Her wedding was to be held at The Sefton Park Palm House in Liverpool. We sat down and started talking through ideas, it was at some point during that conversation, her mum’s attention moved across the studio and found the egg in its display case. I watched her look at it and I could see something happening. Hannah’s family are of Persian heritage, and her mum explained something I hadn’t known. In Persian culture, the egg carries deep symbolic meaning. It appears on the Haft-Seen table at Nowruz, the Persian New Year — one of a collection of carefully chosen items, each representing something for the year ahead. Fertility. New life. The beginning of things. In the sofreh aghd, the ceremonial spread at the heart of a Persian wedding, eggs hold a central place among the offerings that carry a family’s hopes for the couple’s future. She had walked into my studio and seen, in something I had made as a tribute to a beloved baker, a symbol that belonged at her daughter’s wedding. The excitement geared up another level and we started talking about what this could become.
The Mary Berry egg had been a display cake. A dummy, made to be looked at and admired at an exhibition. Hannah’s cake had to be real. It had to be made of actual cake, which changes everything about the structural calculations, the weight distribution, everything. And it couldn’t just be the egg, it needed the scale that a wedding of this nature called for. I designed a large round base cake on which the egg would sit, fixed open at the same angle as the original. There was one shot at this. I knew that from the start when I accepted this challenge. The wedding was being filmed for The Real Housewives of Cheshire and was to be featured in Hello Magazine and there was the matter of the Persian knife dance, a tradition in which the bride dances with her bridesmaids, knives raised, circling the cake as the groom waits. Joyful, theatrical, and entirely focused on the cake as its ceremonial centrepiece. Every guest in that room would be looking at it. Every camera would be pointed in the same direction.
The design evolved through conversation. I showed Hannah and her mum examples of my hand-piped work in royal icing, the ways a surface can be built up layer by layer until it has depth and texture. It was Hannah’s mum who made the connection. Paisley, she said. The paisley shape has its roots in the Persian boteh motif, a pattern that has wound through Persian art and textile for centuries. Could we work with that? We could. I took the paisley reference and built it into the surface of the egg in white royal icing on pale ivory sugarpaste. Tone on tone, so that you have to look for a moment before you fully see it. The pattern moves across the curved surface continuously, the eye travelling around the egg rather than stopping at any single point. A gold band marks where the egg is fixed open and inside, standing in the gold interior, are two tiny figures. Hannah, in her wedding dress, I had been given the details of it in advance so I could get the silhouette right, and her dashing groom Martin, in his suit. I made them as portrait-accurate as I could at the scale they needed to be. Small enough to stand inside an egg. Detailed enough that the people who loved them would know exactly who they were looking at. Sugar roses cascade around the base of the egg where it meets the round cake beneath, where the pattern continues along with hand piped royal icing scroll borders, the same quiet language running from top to bottom so the whole thing reads as one piece. I don’t think there has ever been a wedding cake quite like it.
The wedding went exactly as it was meant to. The dance happened. The cameras were there. Hannah and Martin cut their cake together in that glasshouse amongst their friends and family.
Photo: Lawson Photography
There is a postscript to this story. Because Hannah had seen the original Mary Berry egg in its display case in the studio, she asked me after the wedding whether I could recreate the egg from her cake. Not to eat. Not for another occasion. Just to keep. To live in her home. So I made it a third time. The paisley lacework, the gold interior, Hannah and Martin standing inside. I had a museum-quality Perspex display case made for it to live in. Three versions of the same egg. A tribute to a beloved baker. A wedding cake unlike anything I had made before or since. And then, finally, an object made purely to be kept as a wonderful reminder of a very special day. I have thought about that a lot since. About what it means when someone wants something to exist in their home permanently. Not a photograph of it, not a memory of it. The thing itself, remade, sealed behind glass, kept. I felt it was a huge compliment.
It is Easter as I write this and eggs are everywhere. But what is interesting is what the egg means across so many different traditions. New life. Beginning again. The thing that looks simple from the outside and turns out to hold so much within it. And from a cake maker’s perspective, that simplicity is something of an illusion. For such a deceptively plain shape, an egg is genuinely one of the most challenging things you can attempt to create, the curve demands evenness, the surface forgives nothing, and covering and decorating it beautifully requires a patience and precision that you don’t necessarily appreciate when you embark on it.
Respect the egg.
I hope your Easter is filled with eggs and the promise of exciting new things ahead.
Suzanne Thorp is the founder of The Frostery in Saddleworth, with thirty years of experience in traditional sugarcraft. She has appeared in four series of Channel 4’s Extreme Cake Makers and serves as a judge at Cake International. She is currently developing The Frostery Royal Icing Mastery Programme for cake decorators who want to learn the craft properly.