Yes, it's true. Everything that you see on these pages is not what it seems. It's all cake, designed to deceive the eye, tickle the imagination and taste as delicious as the best you'll find in any patisserie .

For almost 1 5 years, artist Anthea Leonard has taken the festive and celebratory nature of cake in a new direction by crossing her eccentric creative vision and training in graphics and ceramic sculpture with the more traditional techniques of cake-decorating. The result is a modern, fantastic approach-both more populist and high-art in accent-to a highly skilled but rather quaint craft. As Australia's first cake sculptress, Anthea has astonished passers-by over the years with her trompe l'oeil creations in the window of her cake-shop-with-a-difference­Sweet Art on Oxford Street in Paddington, Sydney . Today Sweet Art has a reputation nationwide and abroad for making the wildest dreams come true in cake, no matter how strange or artistically challenging .

Even as a child in Western Australia, Anthea Leonard expressed her creative bent with sculpture. The family moved to Sydney and at age 17 Anthea went from high school, where she consistently got distinctions in art subjects, straight into the workforce. She attended East Sydney College of the Arts three nights a week and weekend workshops in sculpture and drawing. Then, at 21 she decided to see the world . In Florence she completed a 6-month semester in art history before heading off on a backpack tour of Europe guided by a swag of artbooks. She moved on, to Los Angeles, and enrolled in graphics courses and it was while cleaning houses for the rich and famous to pay her way through college that inspiration came for a more interesting way to support herself.

'I got the idea from a shop near where I lived that was run by Glenn von Kickel. He was an artist of sorts and had a bakery called Cake and Art on Santa Monica Boulevarde which I used to walk past every day to catch my bus to art school. From putting these whimsical paintings on the walls of the shop, Glenn began painting on cakes. That was where the idea began for my work. I still visit him each time I go back to LA Last time I was there he asked if I would come and work the weekend for him!'

Starting with a Fourth of July cake for Polly Bergen, Anthea's reputation for making novelty cakes grew as did her clientele in the Hollywood jetset. Cakes for Cher's family, Candice Bergen, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Hope, Dudley Moore-celebrities too numerous to name . 'Elton John would pass through town

and all those sorts of people and bands that aren't even around anymore . Mushroom Records gave me a lot of

work. It just wenton and on and on. I decided if I didn't leave I'd just

never come home .'

So in 1 979 Anthea returned to Australia and

took her portfolio of cake creations with

her when she went for an interview

at NIDA, the National Institute of

Dramatic Art, to get into the set­design course.

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'The interviewer said: 'There isn't anything like this in Australia . Why don't you do this?' Back in those days I was unusual. Australia had never heard of sculpted cake .' Anthea took this advice and in 1980, with the help of an actor and a set-designer from the production of Boy's Own Macbeth that she was working on at the time, she set up shop in Randwick.

'It was purely cottage industry. The shop had a house behind it. I'd bake in my oven in the house at night and I did the shop out with corrugated iron and jacaranda­coloured walls and burgundy ceiling and white lamps. It was just fabulous! We were very proud of it, it looked so

slick . I did that for three years and I thought I never want to live and work in the same place ever again as long as I live. So I found the Paddington shop in '83 .'

Ten years later Sweet Art employs a staff of 13, produces on average 30 cake­artworks a week, has clients all over Australia, from major companies to private individuals, and even flies the odd job to New York and LA. From being the lone artist and sole inspiration for every cake that left the Sweet Art shop in the early days, Anthea has become a creative director who oversees the work of a team of specialists. Anthea acquired the traditional cake-decorating skills of piping, filling, setting-up and cutting-out by 'putting myself for six months on a concrete floor with a team of Mexicans in a bakery in America'. On her return to Australia she learned the arcane laws of baking by trial and error and with the advice of a friendly baker in Clovelly. Now the baking is done off the premises and the design and decorating work is shared by her staff.

'I have to teach the medium to each person who comes to work with me. It makes me proud to have such a fantastically creative team: Margaret Grant paints portraits and enters in the Archibald every year; Trisha Harrison used to teach art-she sculpts things in miniature with dentist's tools. The other decorators are: Faye Cahill

who has a background of three years of art school and a couple at chefs school behind her; artist Stefan Kater; and Glenn Lewis, otherwise known as 'Miss 3-D'. In the beginning I did everything, but one can't be good at everything and as you get bigger it's much better business sense to find people who do that bit or this bit the best.'

A typical Sweet Art week starts with Anthea reading all the orders and proposed ideas for the week's cakes on Monday, checking to see that they work visually and making notes and sketches for the set-up so everyone knows what to do. On Tuesday all the drawings are done-the portraits, the logos (if they have to be blown up) and references are found for images if need be. Wednesday is the big cut-out day and then on Thursday and Friday the cakes are baked overnight, constructed, iced and painted for delivery on Friday and Saturday .

'You have to start prepping Tuesday in order to get that amount of work through. It would be different if it was all fruitcake . We could do it the week before and box it and just have it ready for people to go, but we don't work like that. It's fresh food. It has to be cut out and iced and set up and be out the door within a matter of two days. So there are boards to be cut and if that shape isn't going to work we have to rework the idea . I liaise with everyone-whoever' s doing the cut-

outs, the covering, the flowers-so in the end a lot of what I do is putting the whole thing together.'

The quality of Sweet Art cake is not compromised in the least by its

light-hearted exterior. As well as the traditional fruitcake, cakes can be ordered in chocolate

mud, carrot, orange, chocolate walnut and

hazelnut torte, to name a few flavours. Anthea makes a point of mentioning her attendance, in

the company of Sydney's leading

foodies, at advanced classes in 'Chocolate and Patisserie' and 'Chocolate and Ice Cream' with visiting specialist Joel Bellouet from Le Notre in France.

The output of Sweet Art over the years is nothing short of extraordinary as a browse through the shop's catalogues will prove. There are figures carved in miniature and models sculpted on a monumental scale; there are portraits, caricatured and realist, painted flat on cake or iced in bas-relief or sculpted as three­dimensional busts. The subjects are as varied as the whims and personalities of the thousands of Sweet Art clients: animals, faces, clothing, paintings and sculpture, cartoons, film and book characters, buildings, planes, trains and automobiles, shops, landscapes-you name it, Sweet Art has probably rendered it in cake.

Out of this huge repertoire, the category of illusionary cake that amused me most was the uncanny imitation of food: cake as pasta or meat struck me as the perfect pun of the medium-food mimicking food. It is also a physically disorienting experience when your palate gets a double message: it looks invitingly like cheese but it tastes like cake . So there has been roast chicken; plates of sushi; pizzas; spaghetti with coconut dyed -yellow sprinkled on top; a cheese platter; ice-cream sundaes that fitted into parfait glasses so that everyone got their own cake that looked like a sundae ....

In terms of scale, Anthea says, 'I think the hardest job we've done in years was the fullsize standing portrait of the Queen (a cake-statue that fed 5,000). We've done 7' Ayers Rocks, a cake the size of a single bed and an Abel Tasman cruise ship 6' long.'

Corporate commissions with larger budgets than private projects seem to make the craziest technical demands which Sweet Art meets with ingenuity and a sense of adventure. For Ansett' s 50th birthday cake, Anthea suspended a cake aeroplane by an invisible support against a sky backdrop, covered the wings in candles, spun the propellor and with the magic of photography, voila! cake can fly. ·

Anthea particularly enjoys the challenge of coming up with a cake idea to illustrate a magazine story. The notion of slices-of-the-cake owned by foreign interests in rural Australia inspired the image for a cover for The Australian Magazine- an Australia­shaped cake, in glorious landscape colours and covered in miniature livestock. To complete the visual pun and remind us that this triumph of trompe l'oeil cake-making is in fact a cake, it was given a fancy traditional cake border around the bottom edge and had a thick wedge cut out of its side. Cake as metaphor seems to offer unlimited scope for striking magazine covers and allegorical illustrations .

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While the big budget clients may ask for the impossible, individuals still pose interesting challenges for Sweet Art. 'We did something last weekend where we didn't use any icing or decoration on the cake at all. We made all the floral arrangements and all the letters using dried fruits and nuts and grapes and berries that we held together by dipping in chocolate. We'll attempt anything . You'll get

clients like that. 'We want a cake but we don't want flour . We want a cake but we don't want yeast.' How can

· you have a cake without flour or without icing? So you've got to push yourself in another direction.'

Since making, in the early eighties, an elaborate prop for the film Heatwave (a scale model of a modern architectural complex in cake), Sweet Art has taken on unusual briefs for film and TV in the areas of prop cakes and food special effects. Ads that demand a microphone be eaten, a car body be consumed or a Mars bar turn into a tyre, come to Sweet Art to create the optical illusions . Anthea has stretched what butter cream and icing can do in innovative ways. A recent problem posed by a film company for Sweet Art was to come up with the prototype for 150 fake

tequila worms that wouldn't float or dissolve in liquid. Some advertising briefs have taken Sweet Art away from cake into food-art of another kind, such as Arcimboldo faces made up of seafood, meat and vegetables.

Another new direction for Sweet Art in the last few years has been wedding cakes. 'I never ever did wedding cakes. I started to do the one-off special job (for the movie Burke and Wills she produced a Victorian extravaganza of a wedding cake, for example) and I used to do iced baskets of flowers for weddings. My wedding cakes were never 'normal', never tiered. I refused to use the readymade pillars, ghastly things, so when I have used Corinthian columns, I've handmade them to look a bit special. Wedding cakes is where the money is, it's what's allowed me to keep all the staff in work.' Anthea's elegant two-tiered wedding cakes with a cascade of sugar roses in pale ivory, cream and champagne, created a splash when they first appeared and quickly became Sweet Art's most popular wedding cakes.

Anthea's own taste in wedding cakes tends towards the romantic but restrained. The taste of clients, however, can demand the most over-the-top follies. 'I have a wedding soon that l;ve been working on for a year. They're spending $7,000 just

on the cake. They're getting little replicas of themselves in their bridal outfits, one for each parent and one for themselves!'

The commissioning of a cake is seen by Anthea as a test of her communication skills. She must draw out of the client a workable idea of what they want, then accurately describe the idea back to them to

ensure that they will be satisfied with the final product, and finally, communicate the idea to the Sweet Art team. 'And there are so many people who just say 'I don't know what to do, he's turning 21 ' . So I ask: What does he do? Does he read? Does he surf? Does he have a favourite drink? Part of the joy for me is making people think and then doing something amusing that will tickle the fancy of the person who gets it, as well as the person giving it.'

A Sweet Art creation takes that thrill you feel at seeing your name written on a birthday cake to new heights of egotistical pleasure. Here is an extravagent chef d'oeuvre tailormade in your own image either literally as in a portrait or in its expression of your peculiar interests or passions .

There is another aspect to the wonder of a Sweet Art creation which I think goes back to our infantile desire to eat the world, to literally taste it and consume it. As babies, we put everything we encounter into our mouths to experience the world and as adults, having learned all the food taboos of our culture, we still remember that desire. It is hardly surprising that many a requested Sweet Art fantasy has an explicitly sexual content, but all the cakes are a sensual invitation to experience the world as delicious sugar and cream!

What pleases Anthea most about Sweet Art after so many years is still being able to come up with new ideas that please her as well as her clients. 'That's why I can't turn commercial. People are at me all the time to do a kid's range, to do this, do that. I'd rather just be me and have the few people I love working with and turn out work we're really proud of.'

While Sweet Art has and continues to be a totally involving venture for Anthea, she has found other outletsfor her creative talents. In 1983 Anthea exhibited her first 3-D cake busts of 14 famous Australians at a gallery in the Rocks, Sydney; in 1985 she body-iced a naked couple in a performance art happening at the Roslyn Oxley gallery . More recently, she created unusual

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chairs and picture frames for two AIDS research fund-raising events under the auspices of the G'Day Chair Company. In keeping w ith her passion for theatre and performance, she has worked as props buyer/ set-dresser on Haydyn Keenan's late-80s cult movie Pandemonium, costume- and set-designed G lynn N icholas's theatre show Kissing Frogs and costume-designed a New England Theatre Compan y production of M oliere' s The Game of Love and Chance.

Talks are now under way for an exhibition of her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney . Possibly an installation in a side room

Below, Sweet Art's Sydney Opera House mimics architect Utzon's concept of the shells

as segments of an orange, cut up and arranged. Here the segm ents are cake,

and fake cake at tha t!

upstairs. And the theme? Food aga in, her favourite subject of cake-illusion, but on a new scale of trompe l'oeil: a whole dinner setting where the cutlery, crockery, flower arrangements, candles and all the food are iced . Even the details of the furniture-such as the table base and the picture frames-will be piped like icing in some permanent substance.

Anthea recognises how, over the years, her role has changed as has her attitude to her art: 'In the beginning I was very protective of it. But I don 't see that as a way of growing . People that think that they're the only one with the idea, or that it was totally their idea, end up going nowhere. They end up being in pain because all they can see is someone else pinching their idea or someone else taking the credit for their idea . I think ideas are out in the Universe. You can walk past a shop or go to New York and say 'How did they get that idea? That was exactly how I was going to do it!' I think creation is out there and the more I've travelled the world and the more open to the planet you are, the more the ideas just come. That's what I enjoy. I don't enjoy the ownership of them anymore . That has been me and I've seen it ruin too many people.'

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