Too pretty to eat: Turkish baker creates hyper-realistic cakes

Talented Turkish chef Tuba Geçkil is making the best use of her time during coronavirus lockdowns to focus on her hyper-realistic cakes of just about anything you can think of and along the way, has to become a viral sensation.

Geçkil adding the finishing touches to her life-size creation of Villanelle from BBC drama 'Killing Eve', on display during Cake International 2019 at the NEC, Birmingham.

Geçkil, a self-described “cake and sugar artist,” told Anadolu Agency (AA) that staying indoors allowed her to do what she always really wanted to do but was unable to before due to intense work.

Geçkil, 44, shares her hyper-realistic cakes of everything under the sun with the hashtag #everythingisacake with her over 272,000 devoted followers on Instagram plus thousands of others on YouTube.

Her realistic faux fruits, foods and everyday objects made of cake have set the web on fire, going viral worldwide.

For Geçkil, anything can be turned into a cake that people will greet with amazement and delight.

Although Geçkil stresses that she is not a trained painter or sculptor, even her YouTube profile picture shows her carrying paintbrushes, hinting at her amazing feats.

Geçkil, originally from Turkey’s central Anatolian province of Eskişehir, grew up in a family full of art, with both of her parents being amateur painters.

The award-winning chef is now the proud owner of Red Rose Cake, boasting two locations in Istanbul.

Baking a realistic cake for Geçkil takes around a couple of hours.

“Even if there are artistic details, it can be completed in a few hours at most,” but human modeling takes longer, at least three days, she explained.

For example, a cake depicting German Chancellor Angela Merkel took around a week, she recalled, explaining: “Her hair, it has very fine details.”

The cakes at Geçkil’s workshop have prices ranging from TL 250 to TL 10,000 (around $33-$1,350).

Geçkil is assertive about the taste of her realistic cakes. “I design cakes like a completely personal haute couture dress design, and I customize them with everything from A to Z, according to taste.”

Most of Geçkil’s customers order cakes with their mothers or fathers on them or else want a cake for their children’s first birthday in the shape of the child.

She also gets many orders for realistic cakes in the guise of fruits or other varied objects.

For the future, Geçkil has two projects she wants to tackle if the coronavirus pandemic allows.

The first is to hold an international exhibition on Turkish culture where she will fashion cakes showing traditional Turkish food as well as cultural sites such as Pamukkale, the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Denizli known for its mineral-rich thermal waters and white travertine terraces.

Her second project is to bake a life-size house from the classic fairy tale Hansel and Gretel where children can actually stroll inside and see the inside.

Like the rest of the world, Geçkil is eagerly awaiting the end of COVID-19 so she can realize her ambitious new projects.