Food Explosion Service

LOVE my crazy friends…

This Spring Bompas & Parr launches a food explosion service for weddings. For a fee a trained explosives technicians will lay charges within your wedding cake (or food of choice) which you can detonate at the climax of the evening.

Traditional wedding cakes are a triumph of spectacle over taste. Originally based on the steeple of St. Brides church in Fleet Street cakes prioritise monumentalism over flavour. Bompas & Parr’s food explosion service pushes this ethos to its ultimate conclusion. The ritual of cutting the cake is significantly enhanced through the explosion, the sense of occasion heightened by the blast and your guests are spared eating flavourless fruitcake.

On making a booking an explosive technician (member of the Association of Stage Pyrotechnicians) will liaise with your wedding cake provider on setting the charges and arrange risk assessments and method statements with the venue. They will attend on the day of the wedding to set the explosives, rig the detonator and supervise the explosion. All explosives are transported within containers meeting the MoD’s SEAP 4 security standards as referred to in JSP440.

To celebrate the launch, Bompas & Parr collaborated with renown photographer Ryan Hopkinson on spectacular photographs and a short film exploring what happens when explosives are detonated inside jellies. explore what happens when powerful explosives are detonated inside jellies. The explosions were documented by Ryan Hopkinson allowing the disintegration of the jelly to be studied. The images serve to demonstrate the kinetic, social, biological, nutritional and temporal potential of a single dish and ask the viewer to look again at what’s on the end of their spoon.

Harry Parr, partner of Bompas & Parr comments:
“Wedding cakes can be brutally stodgy. Blowing the cake up spares the stomach after a heavy meal is a good way to wake guests up for the speeches!”

Ryan Hopkinson comments:
“Shooting the exploding jellies was technically challenging. Once the explosion is in progress the jellies become complex moving optical lenses. The light energy from the explosion travels through them at the same time as they are distorted, wobbled and eventually ripped apart by the force. It’s a fascinating spectacle.”

Prices start from £800 depending on scale and technical complexity of the explosion.

Flying Meringues

As a fair few people has asked about the flying meringues on the Cakey Perry menu I thought I would share the Jellymongers awesome version from Cake Britain… Can’t not wait to do them again (apologies again to all at the press night who got hit in the head with them as they floated by)!!!

The sound of jelly

Let’s face it this jelly is not the first thing you think of when you hear this sound (unless that is just me)…

Gingerbread Gherkin (festive archive)

This is amazing – a gingerbread gherkin model from Bompas & Parr. It formed part of their architectural desert trolley which they took to hospitals last Christmas (I gave you my heart, the very next day you gave it away). I have to say this beast is going well but last time I saw it in person, at the Parliamentary Waffle House, it was looking slightly nibbled sadly…

Baking Mad Barking Mad Installation

Bompas & Parr and art directors Emma Rios and Cecilia Carey have created a Jules Verne adventure where sugar crystals are exploded to an architectural scale. Silver Spoon sugar is used to create a crystal cave that imagines the visitor has been shrunk to the size of a standard grain of table sugar (0.3-0.5mm), a size at which the sugar crystals themselves can be seen. It is hoped the fully immersive environment will encourage visitors to be creative with Silver Spoon sugar in the kitchen and visit Baking Mad, an online community with hundreds of delicious recipes. Kitchen experts offer top tips and take the stress out of baking. The work of designers Tour da Force, House of Flora, Sveda Mutlu and Aase is pedestaled by the sugar formations.

Meat Jewellery

Bompas & Parr is launching a range of ‘Meat Jewellery’ at this season’s London Fashion Week. These solid silver skewers can be used to truss quail or to garnish pigs’ heads, but equally as elegant broaches or hair accessories. They will make their debut at Adam Entwisle’s SS11 catwalk show on Monday the 20th September 2010, from 9pm.


The meat jewellery re-introduces a forgotten piece of kitchenalia that can be used to accessorise both meat dishes and dresses. In the early nineteenth century, edible centrepieces were garnished with elaborate skewers called attelets. Chefs threaded whole truffles and blanched coxcombs onto grand dishes such as boar’s heads. Georgian ‘celebrity’ chef Antonin Carême who cooked for George IV, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I, championed the use of a great number of attelets with his dishes; sadly in the last 200 years, these elegant ornaments have fallen out of favour (photo credits Charlotte Ommedal).

Bompas & Parr is bringing the attelet back. Offered as an accompaniment to an original Bompas & Parr tasting served to Entwisle’s VIPs pre-show, these silver skewers will also be fashioned into accessories, adorning the models coming down the runway. Shaped like arrows, swarods and branded spikes, the designs are inspired by early Victorian forms but made using CAD design, rapid prototyping technology and solid silver. The range is supported by a line of glass eyeballs. These were used by chefs in the past as a finesse piece for presentation animal’s heads at grand banquets.

UPDATE: Jellymongers Big Chill Extreme

So like Pete’s Clash stage I got to see the Jellymongers Big Chill installation in person at last…

I absolutely LOVE the health and safety sign too – it really made me laugh (a LOT) and well worth the brutal walk up the hill, as was the installation!

Jellymongers at Big Chill is going to be INSANE – having known about this from the conception stages I can’t do this justice so head over to Design Week for the full low down (snippets of which are below)! Essentially you can breathe in your 5-a-day.

I can’t say a word yet but their installation at the Mad Artists Tea Party is going to be INSANE!

Imagine entering a mystical pyramid, only to be surrounded by a dense mist of vaporised fruit. Venturing further, you wander through an intricate fruity maze, ingesting some of your five-a-day portions of vitamins as you go, and eventually pop out at the top of the three-storey structure to hurtle yourself down a giant slide.

The installation will use the same technology as Anthony Gormley’s Blind Light cube of fog at London’s Hayward Gallery to vaporise fair trade fruit, essentially making taste spatialised – ‘in this way the fruit becomes architecture – an immersive, habitable environment’, says Bompas & Parr.

The consultancy is working with a  myriad of experts, from maze psychologists to design the perfect labyrinth, to Stephen Gage, Professor of Innovative Technology at the University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture (to delve into the theory of buildings as a piece of fruit), and Dr Oliver Firth of the Centre for Altitude Space and Extreme Environment Medicine.

The Mad Artists Tea Party – NEWS RELEASE

All of the art created will exist only temporarily & only in edible form in the medium of cake

OH MY GOD it all seems so real now as it is – Tate & Lyle are kindly supporting the project and it’s go go go. Amazing creative talents already involved with works of art & cake being planned which will blow your minds (clearly I did not write the release but want to post it unedited hence twattish referring to myself in third person).

PRESS RELEASE

THE MAD ARTISTS TEA PARTY

Miss Cakehead, of Cakehead Loves Evil, has teamed up with Tate & Lyle for the first ever Mad Artists Tea Party with Lily Vanilli as Curator of Cake. An original concept from Miss Cakehead, it will pair the World’s most creative cake makers with artists and creatives who want to ‘create with cake’ to produce one-off edible artworks for auction.

All of the art created for the tea parties will exist only temporarily, and only in edible form in the medium of cake. Artists confirmed include David A Smith, Stuart Semple, George Morton Clarke, Pete Fowler, Felt Mistress, stenSOUL, The Futureheads, FAUST and Alexander Turvey with cake-ists including the astonishingly talented food artist Prudence Staite, Bea’s of Bloomsbury, Michelle Wibowo, Crumbs & Doilies, Lily Vanilli & ‘Jellymongers’ Bompas & Parr.

Leading up to the event Miss Cakehead will be touring ‘Cake Britain’ with her edible cupcake tree – an art installation and creative consumer experience that will allow children to literally ‘pick’ their own cupcakes off the tree in a bizarre twist on traditional pick your own farms. The inspiration of the tree coming from The Faraway Tree series of books by Enid Blyton, a concept followed through as the cupcake tree will never ‘grow’ the same cakes twice.

Cake fans be afraid – The next Mad Artist Tea Party event has already been planned. Eat Your Heart Out will be the world’s first 18+ cake shop containing VERY horrifying & VERY extreme Halloween edibles.

Notes for editors:

• The event is being held at The Future Gallery in London the 27^th – 29^th August, following a ‘private eat’ on the Thursday 26^th August where key ‘works of cake’ will be auctioned off for charity.
• During the course of the exhibition a series of unique ‘cakey’ events will take place; from ultimate ‘rock cake classes’ (baking ACDC style) to a sing-a-long Busgy Malone screening complete with splurge guns. More information on booking for these events to be released soon.
• All profits from the event will go to charity, including We Make Peace which campaigns for Peace Education in Schools.
• If you would like to find out more please contact: emmylou.cakehead@gmail.com

Occult Jam – UPDATE awesome levels of outrage

This has made my Sunday – hilarious piece about the Jellymongers Occult Jam, the one made with Princess Diana’s hair,  had a full page 3 in today’s Express (nice to know they are a week behind my blog with them ‘being the first on news’ and all that). It’s worth a read – I have never been more proud of my friends. Read it here.

Best of all I have Lily & Violet staying with me all week (a friends awesome twins) as they are going to Jellymongers for work experience this week – here they are revising!

My lovely friends the Jellymongers are totally fucking awesome in general but have nailed it this time for me: I shall be buying my mother the jam with a hair from ‘Princess Diana’ in it for Christmas.

Since the dawn of time man has struggled to unlock the secrets of eternal life. Occult Jam is a small triumph over mortality. Base ingredients are preserved through their transformation into jam and enhanced with powerful artifacts. The Jellymongers Occult Jam launches at The Surreal House exhibition (more posts on that soon) at Barbican Art Gallery on 24th June.  The jams include the best flavours EVER:

Milk Jam infused with a speck of Princess Diana’s hair

Absinthe and pineapple with sand from the Great Pyramids

Plum and Oak with wood from Nelson’s ship The Victory

Occult jam will be available to purchase from the Barbican Art Gallery Shop – BRING IT ON!!!!

The Complete History of Food

Can’t wait to go to The Complete History of Food, an edible epic so grand, so magnificent, and so vast, it spans 730 years!

It is basically a walk-through dining experience and multi-course meal charting key revolutionary periods in food history. Visitors travel through time eating and drinking food from restaurants including Bistrotheque, Gauthier Soho and Saf. Imagine Heston’s Feast but on a grander scale and open to everyone. Food eras covered include Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and the contemporary scene with a number of global firsts thrown into the mix. Think flooded dining rooms, giant sugar sculptures and dinner in the belly of a dinosaur. Bring on the dinosaur!