Have you checked out the Phnom Penh Post lately?

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on June 6, 2011

Very recently, Bloom Cafe received an excellent one-page colour spread in the ’7 Days’ lift-out section of the Phnom Penh Post newspaper.

Titled ‘Bloom’ Beautiful’, the story begins with: ‘Pencil in Bloom Cafe at the top of your places-to-try list this weekend. Delicious cupcakes, cookies, coffee and caring service are just the cherries on top of this not-for-profit proverbial cake.’

The story sings the praises of our phenomenally talented students and also serves as fantastic free publicity for the Cafe.

As most of us are rather removed from the nearest Cambodian newsstand, you can read it here and let us know what you think!

Bookmark to:

International Womens’ Day Luncheon

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on March 28, 2011

Earlier this month, Ruth was invited as the guest of honour at the annual International Womens’ Day Luncheon held by the Australian Public Service Commission in Brisbane and Townsville. Ruth gave an extremely stirring message that left very few dry eyes in the room packed with people.

She also shared a few inside anecdotes, like this beauty:

Some weeks ago, Bloom was visited by a Cambodian pop star who had the number 1 song in the country. As he was downstairs in the Cafe, word quickly spread amongst the Bloom students in their classrooms upstairs and they rushed to the stairs to see him.

The girls packed the staircase, jostling each other for a better view, with the ones at the top craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the star. As the weight of over 20 girls proved too much for the girls at the bottom of the stairs, they lost their grip on the banister, and suddenly all that was heard was a sharp shriek, followed by screams of laughter as around 25 girls tumbled over each other onto the floor. The Cambodian pop star, probably quite used to such attention, apparently laughed and winked at them, totally making their day.

As a result of Ruth’s address, many attendees have signed up in support of Bloom and several are organising their Advocacy parties even now. To get in on the action and order your advocacy kit, contact Bloom today!

Bookmark to:

Bloom is now tax deductible!

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on January 6, 2011

The team at Bloom have been working at getting tax deductibility status for a while now, so it was thrilling to hear at the end of 2010 that it’s now been achieved.

This means that all your donations and giving towards Bloom are tax deductible for you! It also means we can seek corporate donations as our charity status is also more credible.

This was achieved with the Global Development Group (GDG), a humanitarian organisation that mobilises resources for international aid and development. GDG partners with charities to ensure that all the requirements for tax deductibility are met.

So the next time you give, just provide your details so we can send out a tax deductible receipt to your address.

You can donate in a number of a ways:

a) Use the paypal button to give by bank or credit card

b) Direct deposit online to:

Account Name:  Bloom Training and Cafe
BSB No :              704-913
Account No :       003165

c) Write a cheque payable to Bloom Training and Cafe and send it to:

Bloom Asia, Donations
Attn: Finance Officer
PO Box 2033
Mansfield QLD 4122

For a tax deductible receipt, simply email finance@gatewaybap.com with the details of your deposit or include a request with your cheque. Remember to include your name and address, and the receipt will be mailed to you.

Bookmark to:

Ruth on ABC radio with Steve Austin

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on November 11, 2010

Ruth was recently interviewed for the second time on Steve Austin’s program on ABC Radio in Brisbane. Hear the interview and find out all the latest happenings at Bloom:

click to access audio

Bookmark to:

Flour power in the heart of Phnom Penh

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on

The word’s getting out! Expat Advisory Services in Cambodia recently published this little gem of an article on their website:

Ruth Larwill at Bloom Cafe

Flour power in the heart of Phnom Penh

When I think of Cambodian dessert, I don’t think of cake.

I think of mango. Or sticky rice. Or fried banana nuggets.

But I’ve recently discovered there’s a huge market in this part of the world for cake.

Here are a couple of stats that may surprise you. One of the larger hotels in Phnom Penh sells about $1,500 worth of cake daily. And Bloom, the wonderful cake store and café, which opened its doors this February on Street 222, sells between 120 and 500 cupcakes every day!

I have to admit they are impossible to resist. When you walk through the door of the café, you’re overwhelmed with shelf upon shelf of light, fluffy creations which are, as their marketing suggests, “Too beautiful to eat. Too delicious to resist”. Mounds of thick, creamy frosting piled high on tiny lemon, chocolate or cheesecakes foundations decorated with perfectly designed miniscule flowers, figurines, birds and snowflakes…no less than 50 flavours of cupcake, rotated every three months to provide variety. It’s every dessert lover’s dream.

. . .

Today, Bloom employs 24 underprivileged girls who create cakes worthy of display in any high-profile magazine as well as on the table of Cambodia’s royal family (who have been recent customers of the store, along with the Australian ambassador, the Minister of Phnom Penh city and the recent CAMFood Expo where Bloom displayed their 2.2 meter cake).

. . .

While the concept was created by Ruth (who has been baking and decorating cakes since she was nine), she gives most of the credit to her girls.

“They are constantly amazing me with their creativity,” she said. “Each one of them passed their exams with at least 96 percent and they are always coming up with new ideas.

Some of them told me they prayed every day to find a way out of their circumstances before they met me, and that this work has given them back their value.

I am so grateful I heard their prayers.”

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

Bookmark to:

Tune into Bloom on the radio

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on November 8, 2010

Tomorrow night, Tuesday 9th November at 9pm, Ruth will be speaking live on ABC radio with Steve Austin once more. If you’re in Brisbane, be sure to tune in at 612, otherwise we’ll post an audio clip or transcript right here on our blog.

Ruth last spoke with Steve on June 4th 2009. To refresh your memory, here’s a transcript of her interview. It’s rather long though it’s been shortened, but it’s still very worth the read:

Up Close and Personal with Ruth Larwill: interview on ABC Radio with Steve Austin (6.12 ABC Brisbane)

Steve: Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal activity in the world. 60,000–100,000 underaged girls are trafficked in Cambodia every year, which seems like a staggering figure to me. I mean it’s hard to fathom. Many of those children are kidnapped and sold into brothels. Others are simply tricked into other areas… The rehabilitation process is very long and has extremely low rates of success. 90 % of the girls will be re-trafficked when they return to their home community if they don’t have an alternative way of earning an income. My next guest is someone, who along with her husband, is dedicated to the work of rescuing and rehabilitating at-risk and trafficked girls from a life of misery. Her name is Ruth Larwill and she joins me up close and personal tonight. Ruth, thanks for coming in.

Ruth: Hi Steve. Thanks, great to be here.

Steve: I want you to take me right back. You first went to Cambodia when?

Ruth: October 2006.

Steve: And why did you go there? Not every Brisbane mum just suddenly gets off and decides to head off to Cambodia, do they?

Ruth: No, in fact, if you told me 5 years ago that I will be sitting here telling you this story, I would’ve laughed out loud. I basically consider myself, back then, as a yuppie Westerner. I went to Queensland university, I got the psychology degree, I worked at a travel company for 17 years, as a trainer and consultant there, and my husband and I got to travel the world, we had 2 beautiful boys, and my past time, my favourite hobby was to decorate wedding cakes.

So about 3 years ago, I was praying, and his random thought just used to come into my head, and that was to travel to Cambodia and teach girls that were rescued from brothels, the art of cake decoration. When this thought first came into my head, I thought “where did that come from? It’s so bizarre!” And anyway, I just pushed it out of my mind, like you do, got on business of, you know,

Steve: Living life?

Ruth: Yes that’s right. And it just kept coming and coming into my mind, but the bizarrest thing, Steve, is that I didn’t really know anything about Cambodia and I wasn’t aware of human trafficking really in its entirety. And I’m so not a third world traveller, I’m more your Tuscany, and red wine and cheese kind of traveller, I don’t need to do this, I didn’t want to really. This thought just kept coming into my head.

I told my husband and he said “Wow, well, if it’s God, you’d better do it, you know, what have you go to lose?”, but he said “Well, if it’s God, he’s gonna have to come up with the money to it as well.” And the very next day, I walked into work and my boss sheepishly came up to me, and she said “Oh Ruth, we’re so embarrassed but we’ve just been going through the end of year finances, and we have underpaid you this year. The amount happened to be exactly the price of an airfare to Cambodia that I had looked up the week before. So, I bought a ticket to Phnom Penh.

Steve: What year was this?

Ruth: 2006

Steve: So you took this as some sort of divine sign that you were to go to Cambodia. So you buy the ticket…

Ruth: Uh huh.. so what the worst that you got to, you know, have to lose?

The followng week, I went to my son’s soccer game and a friend of mine introduced me to a woman. She was working in Cambodia. And I’m like, oh wow, I’ve never met anybody before from Cambodia, and here I am. And I said, what do you do there? And she says, “I’m a psychologist, I actually do trauma counselling with girls that are rescued from brothels.

There was no way I was going to tell her what was in my head. I mean who goes around saying that kind of thing? It’s just crazy, I know. So basically, I just chatted with her for a while, about 20 minutes, till I finally got the guts up to say, well, I’ve been thinking that I should go to Cambodia and train girls in the art of cake decoration. And I expected her to laugh uproariously or perhaps not wisely and say, you know, “oh great, another Westerner who thinks they can change the world, you know. She got so emotional and she just said that she’s been praying for somebody who would come and do this, that the girls that they were rescuing, she was constantly finding, that they were being re-trafficked in Cambodia, if they didn’t have another way of earning an income. So, the next week, I went to Phnom Penh, and she took me to go and meet Tia.

Steve: Ok, so I just want to make sure I understand the sequence right. You’ve got the idea, you’ve got the partner’s approval, your boss comes in the next day and says, “We’ve been underpaying you, here’s some money.” You go to your son’s soccer game a couple of days later, you meet a woman who is a psychologist, who works in Cambodia you’ve never met before.

Ruth: Yes, this is the truth.

Steve: And she says, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for x amount of years. You’re a psychologist, you also want to teach girls decorate cakes, and she says, that’s what young girls need in Cambodia, they need something to earn enough money.

Steve: So you arrange to meet her in Cambodia and she introduces you to a young woman by the name of Tia.

Ruth: Correct.

Steve: What happens next? So you meet this young lady by the name of Tia.

Ruth: Yes. Tia was 11 years old when her father died. She was the oldest of 7 siblings. I mean can you imagine being a mother? In the third world country, there’s no social welfare, there’s no one who’s gonna… you’ve got a baby on your hip, another one coming. In Cambodia, the culture is that the children support the family. So, Tia is offered a job in a laundry in Phnom Penh, she gratefully accepts. Unfortunately, she was sold to a brothel in the Koh Kong Province, on the Thai-Cambodian border, which is known for its underage brothels over there. And she was forced to suffer unimaginable horrors. Night after night, the girls are drugged, they’re beaten, they use electric shocks, which don’t leave marks on their bodies….

Steve: The people who traffick these young girls use electric shocks on them, to what, to discipline them?

Ruth: Yes and to coerce them. You’ve got an 11 year old girl who is expected to servicebetween 30 and 40 clients a night.

So for 2 years, she was forced to endure this. When she was finally rescued in a raid by the International Justice Mission, who are working and doing a fantastic work over there. She was taken to a shelter in Phnom Penh, okay, and there she received medical care, counselling, and it was at that time she was told that God loved her, and that there was special purpose and plan for her life.

After a year she was sent home to her village. But unfortunately, the whole village knew what had happened to her, and she’s considered now to be ineligible to be married, used up, probably diseased or whatever. She has no skills, she has no education. She actually had to watch a sibling die, because the family didn’t have enough money for a very simple medication. A trafficker comes by and says that they will look after her family, if Tia will go back and work in a local brothel, Tia feels there’s no other alternative. The social worker goes to do a follow-up visit of Tia, and discovers she’s right back from where they’ve rescued her from, and she was overwhelmed.

I will never forget the day when I was taken to go and meet Tia. We sat down together in a café, with wedding cake magazines, flipping through them, and I looked at her and I asked her, would she like to become a professional cake decorator. She looked up at me with tears in her eyes, and said, every night she used to pray to God and say, “If you love me so much, if you’re so big, then why am I still a sex worker?” And it was one of the most emotional moments in my life, where I got to say, “Well, God heard your prayers and he whispered into the heart of a mother on the other side of the world.”

Steve: So Tia said to you, yes she wants to learn something else?

Ruth: She wanted, yes, she said she prayed to be rescued from the life she thought that was left for her, but she’d been told that somebody told me that there was a special plan for… your life, Tia. You’re the one. And I think that’s it, isn’t it, the one. It’s not just a mass of girls, it’s the one, when you look into their eyes, they’re the ones, and that there is… they’re not forgotten.

Steve: So why, what is it about cake decorating in Cambodia, why, why is that a useful skill over there?

Ruth: (laughs) Do you know, if I’d actually come up with a plan, I would’ve had no idea, I would never have come up with this plan. But it’s been incredible to see how successful it is, because everyone wants to come up with some sort of vocational training, and you know, making cards, making jewellery, none of it makes any money. Cakes are huge over there. They were owned by the French for a 100 years Cambodia was. So they’re so into, like, they even eat baguettes with curry instead of rice (laughs). They do the best baguettes in the world, in fact. So they have massive, big wedding cakes, and even the poorest people have these wedding cakes, because all the guests basically bring 5 bucks and contribute and they pay for their wedding after it and so, you know, that’s their gift.

Ruth: So it is this huge market over there. Everyone’s used to cakes, birthday cakes, whatever. So there’s this massive market over there and no-one does cakes the way that we do, this Western style, it’s all that just butter cream, urgh, it’s so wrong. Anyway, I feel so clever and so proud of them. So yeah, it’s a really good market.

Steve: They eat cake, they know cake and so this is a skill that they can escape sex tourism, escape the life of brothel. For an 11 year old girl, she can become independent, financially independent.

Ruth: Uh huh. And it’s community development too you know, just bringing money into the community, and skills, etc. And I went back to Cambodia. I’ll never forget the first day that I went into the centre and there was Tia and she’d been waiting since the early hours of the morning and she just came running up to me, she had tears streaming down her face, she’s a tiny slip of a girl and she said “Oh, I didn’t think you were ever coming back”.

Ruth: Sorry, it’s such a personal moment that makes it all worth it, sometimes those times, you know….

Steve: Yes, yes.

Ruth: Well Tia is now 1 of 14 girls who are master cake decorators. I’m talking brilliant, sophisticated, people gasp when they see the work that they do, that’s how good they are. And some of the other shelters started asking if we could help their girls.

Steve: Okay, so the women shelters hear what you’re doing with this and also they’re saying, please come here teach our girls this as well.

Ruth: I came back again to Brisbane, I have a friend in Sydney, Leanne Park, who said “Ruth you should do this. Set up a vocational school, we can teach cake decorating, we can set up a café, we can sell the cakes through that. She was so excited and I got really excited as well but all of a sudden, I remembered sitting with Murray one night and going, “This is huge Murray, this is massive. Why do I think I could….? I’m just a Brisbane mum, for goodness sake.

And anyway, the very next day, the senior pastor from our church, Jason Elsmore, from Gateway Baptist church, rings up and says, “Ruth, you know that vocation school idea, I believe our whole church wants to get behind this. We wanna embrace this idea, we’ll do anything it takes, to bring justice to these precious girls in Cambodia.” And da da dum, here we are today. We are going in July, to set up Bloom Training and Café, and we’ll grow from there, small steps, baby steps.

Steve: So, Tia at the moment, she’s now earning an independent income, she’s not working in a brothel, she’s decorating cakes, she’s got freedom, self respect, income and a future.

Ruth: That’s a really good point Steve, because that’s the thing. It’s easier to tell a girl, just give them a job you know, where they just go into a factory, but for them to actually believe in themselves, that they’re creative, that they’re artists, it’s really therapeutic. Somaly Mam, if you ever get a chance to read her book, it’s amazing, “The Road to Innocence”. She was an ex-girl, who was also a prostitute and she was sold into slavery and she tells her story and it will blow your mind if you read that. But she’s now set up a rescue centre and he’s had about 4000 girls come through, but she has a 40% success rate, because the girls are just so,….by the time they’re been used and abused, they are dead, like they have nothing left. So for something for them to believe in themselves, when they see themselves make a foot tower wedding cakes, where people are in awe of, there’s something inside of them that changes, that they believe in themselves.

Steve: What, what a contrast from working in a brothel to making wedding cake decorations.

Ruth: I know. It’s crazy.

Steve: It’s a nice, what’s the word…antidote. I mean, something as pure as a wedding, from what they’ve come from.

Ruth: So I say, God’s very clever. (laughs) We’ve already had 14 girls through so far, but the first course, in the next run, we’ll be partnering with a shelter called Agape, and we’ll be taking 5 of their girls. But I really want to intensely train them, because we’ll be setting them up to be the trainers. I would like the girls to actually own the whole school and take, you know, get rid of the old Westerner. They can manage this whole place by themselves.

Steve: So, so they can take over? They can teach each other, so that women start supporting the other one.

Ruth: Yeah yeah. And they know best how to look after each other. They know what they’ve been through, and I think there’s something really about solidarity about it as well.

Steve: Okay. So now you’re, …. I mean, you’re essentially setting up a school aren’t you? You’re setting up a school, a trade school, to teach these young women a skill, a culinary skill and an artistic skill.

Ruth: Yeah and the hardest thing to teach them is that they do have a creative side.

Steve: What do you mean?

Ruth: Well, having been so long told….they have to do whatever they are told. Like one of the girls, once I asked to see her flower, and her hand would shake. She was so scared that I was going to beat her if it was wrong, and, you know what I mean? They actually have to start to get that self esteem to be able to rise up and say, “Wow, I can have ideas, I can have my own designs, and things like that. And I encourage them “That’s great”. So, it’s quite a journey for them all, that’s really exciting at the end of it.

Steve: So to support what you’re doing, to support the training of Cambodian girls in cake decorating schools, Bloomasia.org..

Ruth: That’s it.

Steve: B L O O M A S I A dot org. It’s a big change from doing a psych major at university, doing travel agency work for a decade.

Ruth: I would never have believed that, that I would get into this, you know, that’s why I know it’s a God thing, because he really cares about these girls, it’s just, he wants to see justice come, that they’re not forgotten, that they’re not abandoned.

Steve: Listening to this program at the moment would be the odd person who’s gone to Cambodia for sex tourism reasons… do you have a message for them?

Ruth: Yeah. Demand is the whole problem, supply and demand. I found it interesting, that most men don’t realise that the girls are not there out of choice, just as much as the men would like to think that they are. Most of the girls, they’re beautiful girls as well, you realise, put on a smile or whatever, because they’ll be beaten to a pulp if they don’t, if there’s a complaint against them. And it really changes the way the people think. And you know, as they get older, and they’ve basically learnt to survive, sometimes, they know no other life, they know that’s who they are and it’s just sad fact that a lot of the madams themselves are girls that were trafficked originally. It’s a survival mechanism, so they get to the point, where it’s so hardened and whatever, but……

Steve: So your program will be teaching those young girls that they have self respect, that they have skills, they can learn cake decorating, that they can actually build a future for themselves…

Ruth: Yes that’s right.

Steve: And they’re artists. They’re artists, they have a creative outlet.

Ruth: Yeah yeah, and eventually down the track, we hope to introduce other, you know, training as well. We’d like to do fashion design. We’ve got a girl who’s gonna come over and do that. And not just fashion design, not just makin clothes, but bring the fashion back into Cambodia and much else.

Steve: I wish you every success.

Ruth: Thank you Steve.

Steve: Thanks for coming in. Ruth Larwill. And you can support Ruth and the school’s work over there, by typing in or by logging on the web, usual these days, bloomasia, the usual Ws, bloom, B L O O M A S I A dot org. Bloomasia.org.

Remember to tune for the Steve’s next interview with Ruth Tuesday night 9th November at 9pm!

Bookmark to:

Experienced English teacher needed to work with survivors of trafficking in Cambodia

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on November 4, 2010

Would you or someone you know be interested in a voluntary position with Bloom Vocational Training in Phnom Penh, Cambodia?

The suitable person will be: 

• of mature Christian faith who will be able to live and work in a challenging environment.
• able to commit to a 12 month teaching period.
• experienced in planning individual and group learning programs responsive to learners’ needs.
• able to teach up to 4 small groups of varying levels of English proficiency for up to 3 hours per week, per group, plus individual tutoring of staff members with advanced level of English for up to 3 hours per week each – to a maximum of 20 hours per week.
• able to self-fund (accommodation available at “She Home” – a ministry of Citipointe Church – for USD150/month).

This is a mission and ministry opportunity guaranteed to enrich your life as you serve victims of human trafficking.

If interested, please email us at hello@bloomasia.org for further information.

Bookmark to:

Cambodia’s largest wedding cake is served!

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on October 25, 2010

As mentioned in a previous post, Bloom was asked to make Cambodia’s largest wedding cake for the first International Food Fair in Phnom Penh.

It took a 5-tonne truck and 8 men to transport the cake from Bloom Cafe to the exhibition hall! Here we get the inside scoop from Bloom intern Karin:

Although it’s early in the morning, the Cambodian Convention Center is already buzzing with activity as 4 tuk-tuks of girls arrive at the front doors. The passengers disembark and head for the entrance, ready with their badges allowing them in to the first ever, three day Cambodia Hotel and Restaurant Exhibition.

In a proud throng of blue and brown, and with a measure of nervous excitement, the girls walk past vendors busy setting up their booths toward the display which is already being talked about all over Phnom Penh: Cambodia’s Biggest Wedding Cake.

The cake rises 2.2 meters above its table to tower over gaping passers-by. A stunning vision of pink and green, overflowing with beautifully sculpted lotus blooms and delicate buds, it is truly an impressive sight to behold.

The girls smile at the sight of the cake, because it is their masterpiece: every flower crafted with the finest attention to detail, down to the veined pattern in all the thousands of petals, each hand-painted to perfection; every layer of cake mixed, measured and baked; the assembly and icing; down to the final finishing touches and placement of each decoration. The many hours of effort that went into this cake have culminated in this event.

The opening ceremony of the convention, presided over by the Minister of Tourism, ends with the Minister himself cutting the cake. Seeing the Bloom girls in their crisp uniforms, standing next to their cake, heads held high, as dignitaries acclaim their expertise and a posse of photographers poise their lenses to capture the moment, you would never guess where these girls have come from. The honor that they have received as a result of Bloom being asked to participate in such a showcase is unprecedented.

As they gracefully move through the marvelling crowds, distributing slices of fruitcake, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could look down on them because of their background. They have earned not only the respect, but the admiration, of some of the most notable names in the city.

They will always be able to remember this day with pride, knowing that they are part of something special. And with an accomplishment such as this to their credit, it’s impossible to predict where the future will take them!

Bookmark to:

A volunteer’s message

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on October 14, 2010

Hi I’m Leanne, and I have the honour of being in charge of Communications for Bloom. I was recently in Cambodia and had the great privilege of spending time with the girls and attending the third graduation of Bloom students.

What I love most about Bloom is that it’s a place of hope, where the dignity that was stolen from God’s daughters is restored to them in such a beautiful and practical way. It’s as though, when Bloom was set up, God decided that nothing was going to get in the way of his girls’ futures.

No literacy? No problem. The course is taught verbally using flash cards, role play and hands-on training. Girls who have never been educated pass the course with flying colours. And make no mistake: the course is not dumbed down for them. It has international accreditation equivalent to the Australian Cert II.

No skills? No worries. Under Ruth’s tutelage, the students at Bloom have accomplished so much in 12 months that you could literally make a movie out it. Bloom cakes have made their way to the Royal palace, are ordered regularly by the Prime Minister’s family, featured on the front page of the Cambodian Daily and now Bloom has been asked to make Cambodia’s biggest wedding cake at the first International Food Fair in Phnom Penh.

No confidence? You’ve come to the right place – it’s our specialty. Having a sense of self-worth is a HUGE thing for girls who have been taken advantage of all their lives, who have for so many years been broken and raped and taught that they were worth nothing but the ability to service men. Learning that they were born for greater things, that they are worth more, is a huge step for them. Upon graduation, each student receives a silver bracelet which is engraved: ‘Her value is far above rubies or gold’ (verse from Proverbs 31). In many ways, this is even more valuable than the practical skills they learn, because it is in this that they perceive their worth in the eyes of their Heavenly Dad and understand their own identity as his daughters.

Bloom has created an incredible niche and cult following in Phnom Penh in such a short time, and I can’t wait to see where God takes us next. Thanks so much to all our supporters and Advocates who have taken part in this journey so far.

If you’d like to join us, please sign up for our newsletter (and add hello@bloomasia.org to your mailbox so they don’t bounce) and feel free to drop me a line at leanne@bloomasia.org for any questions.

Bookmark to:

Fresh from the Phnom Penh Post: Bloom to make Cambodia’s largest wedding cake

Posted in: Blog by Bloom on September 30, 2010

It’s in the news and it’s official: Bloom has been commissioned to make Cambodia’s largest wedding cake in the nation’s first international food and hotel exhibition in November.

They reported:

… the country’s biggest cake will also be unveiled at Camfood and Camhotel 2010, which runs from October 21-23 at Diamond Island Centre, Diamond island, Phnom Penh.

Ruth Larwill from Bloom Cakes and Cafe in Phnom Penh is in charge of making the giant cake, which will be 2.2 metres high and 1.1 metres in diameter.

Decorated with about 1,000 lotus blooms and leaves, the decorations would all be edible and take some time to carve, she said.

“We’ll need to spend about 1,000 hours to make the cake and place all the decorations. Everything on the cake can be eaten, even though it looks as if they are real leaves, lotus flowers and roots.”

A team of about 22 pastry chefs would work on the giant cake, she said.

It’s great local exposure for Bloom and a huge source of pride for the girls!

Click here to read the entire article, and keep your eye out for the pictures of the cake that we’ll post right here and on Facebook.

Oh, if you haven’t friended us already on Facebook… what are you waiting for??

Bookmark to: