How Savyscakes Turned Cake Into Couture

The wafer paper was delicate, almost too delicate. One wrong brushstroke and it would tear, crumple, or worse, disintegrate into sugar dust. But night after night, surrounded by bowls of cornflour and with edible glue on her fingers, Chammarie Daniel wasn't baking. She was designing.

- BY RIHAAB MOWLANA

A week later, at Noche Latina, her creations walked the runway. Not stitched. Not sewn. Baked.

"They wanted me to do something with cake, or sugar flowers," she says. "But I told them I'll do edible clothes."

And just like that, Sri Lanka got its first taste of cake couture.

No Moodboard. No Manual. Just Madness and Magic.

When Colombo's dance community came together to host Noche Latina, the goal was to celebrate talent both on and off the stage. Many showcased fashion, jewellery, or styling. Chammarie Daniel, a cake artist with over 13 years of experience running Savyscakes, had other ideas. "Honestly, it was designs I came up with on the go," she says. "All I wanted was for them to look magical."

With no blueprint, no prior experience in edible fashion, and no real example to follow, she turned to the internet in search of inspiration and found nothing. "I scoured the internet to see if edible fashion of this kind, using this medium - outside of cake, of course - had ever been done before," she says. "I didn't find anything. This was the first time I even attempted making edible fabric," she says. "Even for a cake."

Her medium of choice was wafer paper, normally used for cake flowers or edible prints. But Chammarie didn't want it to look like a gimmick. She wanted texture, movement, garment. "I made my clothes with something called edible fabric," she explains. "It's wafer paper converted using two simple ingredients that, when brushed over, make it soft and pliable, with a velvety texture... like fabric."

The pressure was real. "Since this was the first time I was doing it, I didn't want to start too early as I wasn't sure how long it could be kept for," she says.

"And wafer paper is very expensive, so I didn't want to misuse the ones I had already purchased."