"department store" news and stories

What's a luxury department store to do when it hits the century mark? If it's Berlin's KaDeWe, or Kaufhaus des Westerns, the answer is simple. Let them eat cake, and lots of it.

Yesterday the store served up an enormous 20-foot tall cake to celebrate its 100th birthday. As you can see here, the confection's lowest tier was adorned with a replica of the store, including marzipan customers, complete with shopping bags. An enormous cake is especially fitting for the luxe KaDaWe given that it has a renowned food hall. With 164,042 square feet of selling space, the store also happens to be Europe's largest.

Me and my sweet tooth are holding out for one of New York City's great retail destinations to whip up a similar cake for a special occasion.
[via Spluchster]

Around this time last year, a department store in Japan offered up a million dollar cake. This year's cake at the Takashimaya department store in Osaka is not quite as pricey, but is still nothing to sneeze at. The 14-inch high cake is studded with about 100 diamonds totaling 50 carats. The cake itself has a square chocolate base and a chocolate sculpture of some kind on top that makes it look like a showpiece - which, of course, it is.

The cake is priced at $848,600 or 100 million yen, but a spokesperson for the store said that the value of all the diamonds on the cake is much higher than its price tag. She also suggested that "it would be ideal if a man were to buy it as a present for his wife."

The cake has been on display for at least a few days now and will remain up through Christmas, even if it is sold before then.

[via spluch]

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I can sort-of understand the $99 chocolate bunny for sale on the Neiman Marcus special occasion desserts website. Though I'm not completely sure what "semi-solid" means, the bunny is 19-inches high and weighs almost 5 pounds. And $35 for egg-shaped chocolate chicks is not entirely unreasonable because they have been painstakingly hand-decorated with colored chocolate. I have to draw the line on exorbitantly priced desserts somewhere, though, and the set of three chocolate eggs filled with marshmallows, graham cracker and caramel does not seem worth the $80 price tag, especially considering the additional $17 shipping fee. The most unreasonable dessert is a six-inch square cheesecake, wrapped in chocolate "paper" to look like a present, that retails for $190 plus $27 for shipping. Did I mention that the cake only serves 6 people?

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Somehow, we missed the 176-pound solid chocolate Brad Pitt that was put on display in a department store in South Korea over Valentine's Day. According to Best Week Ever, the near life-size model was a response to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il's commission of a 200-pound model of Leslie Nielsen made out of olives. The likeness of Brad does not look exactly like him, but there is a resemblance and no doubt the effort was greatly appreciated by fans of the actor. Brad Pitt sounds a lot more appetizing, generally speaking, but it seems safe to say that chocolate will win over more people than a 200-pound pile of olives.

No word on what was done with the chocolate when the display was taken down. It didn't turn up on eBay, so it is safe to assume that it was either eaten or melted down and recast.

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We have mentioned both a $10,000 cake and a $950 cocktail here at Slashfood, but we have never before seen a cake like this one. Selling at a department store in Tokyo is a cake that costs $1.7 million dollars. The two tiered fruitcake, created by pastry chef Jeong Hong-yong, is covered in marzipan and a total of 223 diamonds, the largest of which is a heart-shaped, 5-karat stone. Though the article mentions that there "have been many inquiries," it does not say whether the cake has been purchased outright.

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