A talented baker has cooked up top prize in a competition after creating a life-sized cake of young royal Prince George.

The cake, which stands 0.9m tall, won the top Gold award at the Cake International event held at Birmingham's NEC this weekend.

Winning baker and self-confessed royalist Lara Mason, from Walsall in the West Midlands, said she decided on George as her muse as much for tactical reasons, as anything else.

The 29-year-old explained that having won the same award last year with her life-sized cake of Hollywood A-lister Jennifer Lawrence's character in The Hunger Games, judges advised her that she needed to focus on detail.

Mrs Mason said: "Basically, last year the judges said the cakes were great but being so large they were missing on detail, and the faces in particular.

"Those are the most important detail, so I went smaller and thought that I should do the most recognisable child in the world, which is Prince George."
It took Mrs Mason 30 hours to craft the cake, which is built on a skeleton of steel, wood and PVC tubing.

Layers of cake were then baked and placed around the skeleton, while blocks of modelling chocolate made up the face, which were shaped to match the subject's features.

The cake was then covered in icing and painted with food colouring.

In the case of the winning creation, George was depicted in the same outfit of red shorts and patterned white shirt that he wore for the Christening of his sister Princess Charlotte in July.

Fresh from her win, Mrs Mason - who got married in Malta two weeks ago - said she is now under even more pressure, as she has just a week to bake her own wedding cake for a party at home to celebrate the recent nuptials.
She added: "Next year I am definitely having a break."