We've made some pretty ambitious corporate cakes over the years, from branded logo cakes and product launch centrepieces to elaborate designs for company anniversaries and corporate events. When the team at ServiceNow got in touch about a cake for a new product collaboration with Deloitte, their brief came with a challenge: recreate one of London's most intricate buildings in cake. No pressure, then.
They had a design brief ready. An AI-generated image of a cake inspired by the Lloyd's of London building, incorporating their corporate logos and branding. Now, if you're familiar with the Lloyd's building, you'll know that it's hardly the simplest piece of architecture to recreate. It's covered in external pipes, lifts, steelwork and approximately eight billion other fiddly bits. And AI, being AI, had decided that all of these details were absolutely essential.
The building on the resulting cake design looked suspiciously like a server (I had to clarify with the customer!), but we rather liked the challenge.
We're seeing more and more customers approach us with AI-generated cake designs. Some are lovely. Some are completely unhinged. Almost all involve an extraordinary amount of detail that would cost a small fortune to recreate. The tricky part is that an AI image doesn't come with a guide to construction, costs or the hours involved in making 300 tiny windows. Working out what can actually be made (and transported safely) is where our cake decorators come in.
But this corporate cake brief was different. The client had a clear purpose, an exciting product launch to celebrate, and wanted something genuinely impressive to mark the milestone. The challenge was figuring out how to turn the AI image into an actual, structurally sound cake without losing the recognisable features of the Lloyd's building.
One of the biggest challenges with architectural cakes is deciding how much detail to keep. With a building as distinctive as Lloyd's of London, you can't remove every fiddly detail. The exposed structural features are what make it recognisable in the first place. But we're making a cake, not constructing a scale model for an architectural exhibition.
We had to work out which elements were achievable, how to interpret the reference image and how to incorporate the ServiceNow and Deloitte branding into the finished design. And, rather importantly, how to make sure the entire thing could survive delivery to a corporate event in London. Because no matter how impressive a cake looks in photographs, it's not much use if it arrives as a pile of rubble.
Corporate cakes don't have to be a round cake with a company logo stuck on the front. Although, for the record, we're very happy to make those too as those are often the most economical option for tighter budgets. Sometimes the brief is simply to recreate a company logo in edible form. Other times, like this ServiceNow and Deloitte collaboration cake, it's an elaborate architectural design requiring higher skill and more time.
The whole point of a bespoke corporate cake is that it can be tailored to the occasion, whether that's a product, a brand, a building or something completely specific to the business. We love making non-boring corporate cakes.
As for AI-generated cake briefs, we're always happy to have a look. Some can be recreated with minor adjustments, while others need a substantial rethink to account for structural limitations, production time and realistic budgets. A cake that looks fairly straightforward in an AI render can involve days of painstaking work.
So if you're planning a corporate event and have an AI-generated cake reference, send it over with your ballpark budget. We can advise on what's achievable, what needs adapting and how much it would cost. And if your brief involves recreating one of London's most complicated buildings in cake form, we've now had some practice.
This Lloyd's Building project began with a striking AI image and ended with a cake built around the details that made the original architecture recognisable. If you have a sketch, a reference image or simply an idea for your own event, we'd love to see it.
Explore our corporate cakes and get in touch with your brief.
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