London-based bakery retailer Konditor & Cook unveiled the trial version of the cake it will be producing for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

The ‘Portrait of the Queen’ will be made up of 3,120 cakes - one for every week of her reighn - and will be put together (and then eaten) at the Diamond Jubilee Festival at Battersea Park, in London, on 3 June.

The firm demonstrated how the full-size cake would be made and assembled in a trial-run of 500 cakes at its St Mary Axe shop, at The Gherkin, yesterday (3 May).

Gerhard Jenne, founder, Konditor & Cook, and the man behind the idea, explained that the team had used cross-stitch software in order to break up the image into colours (24) and symbols.

Jenne told British Baker that Konditor & Cook takes part in the Thames festival each year, and usually bakes a cake which people can then decorate, before eating. He said the organiser of the festival was also the pagent master for the Queen’s Jubilee, so he put the idea of the portrait cake to him, and it went from there.

Around the portrait a frame of fruit-cake will also be fitted, and then covered with diamond-shaped gingerbread biscuits. Visitors to the festival will be invited to decorate the gingerbread biscuits themselves, said Jenne.

“The baking will be done around three days in advance, then it will take around eight hours to put all the cakes in place on the day.”

More than 1,000 eggs (83 dozen), 50 kg of butter (200 packets), 150kg of sugar (150 bags)and 36 kg of marzipan (144 packets) will be used to make the cube shaped 4.5cm x 4.5cm cakes. The full-size portrait will measure 3.2m x 2.7m.