Devoney Scarfe is no ordinary baker; her interest lies in the “grey area where art meets baking”. In fact, she even decorates grey areas with her “street piping”, which is basically graffiti with an icing bag. Along with her friend Isla Osborne, she entered their street piping at the New Zealand Sculpture on Shore exhibition – creating a piece made from piped royal icing on concrete. “It washed away over time. I love the impermanence of it, kind of like sand castles or bubbles,” Devoney says.
So, not your ordinary baker. She mixes ‘old-fashioned’ ingredients with amazingly innovative techniques.
“I’m a bit of a 1950s cook,” she reveals. “I have a deep passion for baking with refined white flour, eggs, butter, refined white sugar and real chocolate.”
“My focus is on sculptural one-off pieces. Sometimes I’ll make just one cake a week, as that’s how long it takes”
A recent cake project with Microsoft is a case in point: she teamed up with an animator to make a cake influenced by a zoetrope (a 19th-century animation device that creates the illusion of motion as it spins). She is also well known for her skull cakes based on the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ theme.
She started getting orders for the skull cake after posting a photo on Facebook: “I recently made a pink skull cake for a 70th birthday – the daughter ordered it as a surprise.”
