Beef Wellington takes the cake at Melbourne Royal Show

Inside a glass cabinet at the Melbourne Royal Show there’s an entire charcuterie board, a Sunbeam Mixmaster, a giant ladybug and a zeitgeisty beef Wellington, pastry gleaming in the sunlight.

Except it’s not a beef Wellington at all, it’s one of the prize-winning cakes in the decorated cakes competition at the show.

Sculpted from fondant icing, some of these creations are so realistic it is hard to believe they are cakes, calling to mind the popular Netflix show Is it Cake? on which contestants create hyperrealistic replicas of everyday objects and judges have to guess which are real and which are actually cake.

The Melbourne Royal Show’s cake decorating competition has been running since 1911, and head steward Susan Campbell Wright says that from the very beginning there have always been some “creative” entrants.

“Last year there was one that looked exactly like a sink sponge and a dishcloth,” she says. “It just looked like it was sitting on the side of your sink, and it was cake decorating. People have some wacky ideas.”

Campbell Wright says the beef Wellington cake has been a crowd favourite because “it’s tapping into popular culture and what people are talking about”, alongside a cake made to look like a fish complete with scales and an entire charcuterie board of cheese and salami.

“All three of those, I think everyone’s just lining up to look at them,” she says. “We know it’s cake, we know it’s sweet and sticky, but it’s a fish or a piece of salami or pastry on the beef or whatever. Your mind can’t quite reconcile what that’s going to taste like.”

Campbell Wright says it was a hard task for the judges, but the fish cake eventually took out first prize because of its “eye for detail”, including individual variations on each fondant fish scale. The beef Wellington cake came in third place.

One secret of the trade is that the competition-decorated cakes are often made using a foam replica rather than actual cake, although the icing and decorations are all edible.

“Some years ago, we introduced the concept that for some of the fun classes and especially for novices that you can use a ‘former’ as long as it could be replicated in cake,” Campbell Wright says.

“The feedback was that the cost and difficulty of the cakes was a big problem for the decorators, so we want to see the decorating. Cake decorating for us is a craft, it’s not part of our cookery competition.”

One of the winners this year was 16-year-old Jessica Henricks, who won the Best In Show Schools & Youth Decorated Cakes for her Winnie the Pooh Cake in her first year entering the Melbourne Royal Show.

Henricks first started baking when she was 12 years old, inspired by her mother.

“She made cakes for fun and then she started teaching me the basics, and then I just carried on from there,” Henricks says. “I like challenging myself and trying new things and [baking] is calming in a way.”

Henricks’ Winnie the Pooh cake took several weeks to make, and she says the hardest part was making the faces of the figurines including Eeyore and Winnie which took several attempts for each one to get right.

“It’s based on the 100 Acre Wood,” Henricks says. “My new school that I started at is on a 100 Acre Wood. And so it inspired me to do a Winnie the Pooh themed cake.”

And yes, Henricks is a fan of the television show, Is it Cake?, which she watches regularly with her mum.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.