DAY ONE: OPERATION WORLDS BIGGEST SOH Cake!

WEATHER: A hot muggy day in Sydney, reality was walking up the street to get a sandwich meant that we were muggy and hot!

WHERE: Planet Cake’s studio 10 minutes from the CBD

PC STAFF: All of the team were on board today to see us kick off.



ADDITIONAL CREW: After giving me a heart attack and telling me he couldn’t be here Jean Michel he has been coming after hours every day directing, instructing and helping us all execute this mammoth task! Jono has been working his fingers to the board, creating all the bespoke boards and incredibly difficult drawings! Here they are both pouring over the plans.



VOLUNTEERS: The volunteers have been split into two groups, the Sopranos and the Tenors!! The Sopranos were first up for the morning shift.





DAY #1 PLAN:

The plan today was to do all the prep for the coming week, this included making 300 + Kg of ganache, sandwiching and filling the hundreds of cakes, making dowels, getting to know each other and generally filling in time until the real work could begin tomorrow when the Styrofoam was sorted out and all of Jono’s measurements and boards were in. I thought that this was a spanking plan of action….

CHALLENGE #1 - JOBS

The first challenge was finding jobs for the volunteers while we waited for the big stuff to work on. First team up, the Soprano’s finished making all of the ganache and filling all the cakes by 11am, they were so fast I immediately started thinking about potential employment opportunities at PC, I was speechless, I thought it would take them all day! I would need them to start carving Styrofoam and that was an issue unto itself!




CHALLENGE #2 - STYROFOAM

We need Styrofoam for the base of the cake and the sail tips; we need 13 styro cubes to cut the sails from. The Styrofoam that arrived instead of being 13 cubes was 13 icebergs! After ringing the Styrofoam Company who were most unhelpful I decided to put the Sopranos to the test, a problem halved or shared is a better problem I heard or something like that!

Step One: Investigate the Styro berg





Step Two: Build a Styrofoam Cave (the Sopranos built this at the back of PC)



Step Three: Get into your styro safety equipment


Step Three: Attack the Styro Iceberg with a saw!



MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Ready for carving the sails



CHALLENGE #3 – Working out the boards. Jono and Jean-Michel have been working out this problem for days. Here is Jean-Michel working with volunteers Laura and Abeni transferring the templates created by Jono onto the boards for cutting.





DAY # 2: PLAN

Tomorrow we need to carve the base shape out of Styrofoam. Build, cover and place the boards and start shaping the bottom layers of cake in the sails. Follow the red lines for the cake line guide.



Final Note: The volunteers have been even better than I hoped, extremely fast, efficient, enthusiastic and truly professional, its not us and them its working alongside your team mate and it’s a great feeling to have such a big, talented and professional team…I think we might get this done!

See you tomorrow!!