Founder of Dear Harley Bakery, Alison Chan is Hong Kong’s go-to hyperrealistic cake maker, designing desserts made to confuse and delight.
In early November last year, Alison Chan sat on a 13 hour flight to London and a three hour car ride to Birmingham to bring a cake from Hong Kong to an international cake making competition. She won gold.
The hyper-realistic cake was designed in inspiration of Alison’s toddler’s childhood, copying the identical looks of her son’s tiny shoes placed delicately on an oaky brown shoe cabinet.
“My staff convinced me to join Cake International [an annual competition for cake design in the UK] with her. I made the baby shoe cabinet cake, whilst one of my staff made another cake,” Alison recounts. “And we both won!”
The cabinet took dozens of hours and her whole team reconstructed eight pairs of his actual shoes and emulated the natural wood pattern of the real cabinet they had at home.
The realistic cake business has its roots in the comical late 2000s reality TV show circuit in the U.S., most famously Cake Boss on TLC. Towards the beginning of the 2020s, Netflix’s Is It Cake? and Sideserf Cake Studio brought hyperrealism to the dessert world, creating master illusions in cake-form.
Her business Dear Harley Bakery began in 2018 producing cakes and desserts for weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries. When the pandemic hit Hong Kong, the mood and economy was not right for celebrating. “I was thinking, how can I turn this around and generate some attention for myself,” Alison says.
The realistic cakes sprung up on her Instagram page and earned her and her team instant virality online. They have designed a realistic miniature red sports car, bowl of ramen, Rolex watch and case, siu mai basket, casket of red wine, shampoo bottle, salmon steak, and TV remote.
The cakes are decorated and filled in with flavours like dark chocolate, Earl Grey, matcha, red velvet, vanilla, and strawberry to bridge the gap between beauty and flavourful.
Alison uses fondant and edible paint instead of sugar painting to achieve the closest resemblance to real objects.
“The fun,” Alison says, “of our realistic cakes is that people don’t know if the cake is real or not! The fun part is tricking customers into making people believe their sushi, dim sum, apple, lobsters, or other food is real and not a cake.”
Her cakes are made to order and customised based on specific celebrations per customer. They cost upwards of thousands of dollars and sometimes involve more than a dozen hours to reproduce. “People love them for big celebrations!”
Whilst Alison has benefited from the recent cake trick trend, her popularity has come from Hong Kongers seeking to support a homegrown version of the realistic cake makers.
“When we have a local cake artist that can make realistic cakes, they want to support us and pay attention to our work. I have definitely benefitted from the Netflix show!”
Her craft earned Alison an exhibition in summer of 2022 at K11 Musea’s presenting her Dear Harley Bakery’s ‘Cake Illusions’.
Alison’s most challenging project to date was the gold-award-winning shoe cabinet, taking her two weeks to reproduce every minute detail of the shoes and cabinet, down to the texture and shading. The red oak wood pattern involved several hours of fine-tuning the colour for the competition.
In a team of five, Alison’s bakery company produces multiple realistic cakes every month, feeding into the creative side of the business. The bulk of Dear Harley’s business involves corporate orders, traditional pastries, cakes, and desserts.
Launched two years ago, Alison now regularly invites bakery experts from around the world including Spain, Taiwan, and France to host workshops at Dear Harley to continue educating her team on how to make the most realistic cakes.
Order a magical realistic cake designed by Alison Chan and her team for your next celebration with Dear Harley.
