Culinary creation takes the cake
Our talented landscape architects put their creativity to the test to convey a powerful message through cake.
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The team took on the culinary challenge as part of an Urban Landscape Design Cake competition held during Melbourne Design Week.
Their delicious response, named ‘As Above, So Below’, was crafted by a passionate baker in our team, Associate Xiao Lin. She was joined by plenty of willing helpers (and taste testers) from among her Landscape Architecture colleagues.
Spiire was one of the local studios selected to participate in the competition, which prompted entrants to reimagine a site under development in the city as parkland. Xiao says the Spiire team’s concept was to address historical imbalances in Naarm/ Melbourne CBD.
“The city’s development in the 1800s disrupted natural systems. We envisioned a city where nature thrives, celebrating Country by peeling back layers of urbanisation to reveal Melbourne’s original landscape – enacted through burning a top layer of rice paper to reveal preserved artefacts and restored waterways,” she says.
This exploration of the city’s layered history aimed to capture the essence of walking through a Melbourne bush trail, using Indigenous ingredients such as oldman saltbush, wattleseed, lemon myrtle, native juniper berry, and strawberry gum.
“One of the unique characteristics of cake is you can cut through to show all the different layers,” Xiao says. “We wanted to use that concept to explore what is underneath the CBD, through a depth of flavours and incorporating textures such as flower pollen.”
From developing the concept together with Azin Emampour, Matthew Bradbury and Alexandra Lee, through an all hands on deck assembly, it was a true team effort. Xiao presented the finished cake to a judging panel of peers in the built environment sector – well-supported by her Spiire colleagues.
Well done to our landscape architects for all the thought and hard work that went into making the masterpiece.
