Never has a Queen had a better reason to say “Let them eat cake”. Four engineering teams are preparing to do battle in a contest to make the tallest cake to mark the Diamond Jubilee.

The rival companies will show off their engineering and baking prowess, equipped with a total of 66lb of flour, 408lb of butter, 990lb of sugar, four vats of golden syrup and 1,480lb of chocolate.

The contest will be held to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee on Sunday at the Battersea Park festival in London, near to the start of the river pageant.

It has emerged that Arup - the company who created the Gherkin skyscraper in London - will be producing a replica of the iconic towerblock.

After weeks of planning, the team behind the project are set to build their cake to the height of a two-storey house.

Stephanie Black, an electrical engineer with Arup, said the team was used to working with concrete and steel, but less so with materials such as chocolate and fruit cake.

“We had to do a lot of testing on the new materials before we realised that diamond-shaped blocks of crispy cakes were the most sturdy,” she said.

The crown of the bullet-shaped building will be formed of delicate spun sugar.

Also in the mix for the competition are Expedition Engineering, a team who are planning a cake made of ice cream cones; Buro Happold, who will create a cake tower topped with a Union Jack-shaped sponge; and the Young Structural Engineers team, who will bake a creation involve cupcakes and chocolate pillars.

The cakes will afterwards be fed to the crowds.

(Read by Emily Cheng. Emily Cheng is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)