Michelle Wibowo is talking about sugar flowers or, more specifically, how much they bore her. Don’t get her started on buttercream icing either – or moulded cartoon animals.

Wibowo might make cakes but they’re a far cry from anything your granny would have recognised. She describes herself as a “sugar artist” who makes 3D sculptures that just happen to be edible – and the wackier the better. “I’ve never turned anything down for being too crazy because I love that sort of thing. I love the challenge. People ask me if something’s doable and I tell them it is…then work it out later.”

Huge crates are hurried out of her studios in the West Sussex village of Lindfield at all hours of the day and night containing life-sized famous figures made of fruit cake, scale-models of London churches and on one occasion, a giant Corgi.

While tennis fans celebrated Andy Murray’s historic Wimbledon win earlier this month, Wibowo hit the headlines herself after working for 48 hours straight to make a cake bust of the sportsman’s head, on commission for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

As it turned out, that wasn’t even the most challenging part.

“We had to get the cake to Scotland and the courier turned up in a saloon car. After three hours of trying, the cake still wouldn’t fit in the boot so my husband and I had no option but to deliver it ourselves, driving through the night with my threeyearold daughter Kyla in tow.”

Prior to that, she had been tasked with constructing a larger-than-life picture of Beyoncé’s face out of hundreds of cake pops; before that, an enormous sculpted cake of the Queen (complete with Corgi), which went on to take both gold and silver at Germany’s Culinary Olympics (yes, really – there’s a Culinary Olympics).

She has taken on the challenge of making the world’s largest cupcake (200 eggs, 50 hours in the making and more than a metre high), carved a suckling pig from sponge for the Experimental Food Society (of which she is, of course, a member) and created countless cakes for celebrities such as Arsenal footballer Theo Walcott and corporate names including Virgin Atlantic and Samsung.

She is presumably in a minority of cake-makers whose day-to-day work involves the signing of confidentiality agreements. “round or square with pretty icing” she usually says no.

“It just doesn’t interest me.

I want to make things I’ve never made before.”

Her architectural background has proved unexpectedly useful in her subsequent career; she completes scale-drawings of every project before cracking a single egg and has to construct clever internal structures to support and hold the cakes in place.

For likenesses of people, she works from photographs, poring over the subject’s bone structure and colouring until she has fixed their face in her mind’s eye. “I always loved sculpting from clay when I was younger and I used to be very keen on watercolours. The skills I use now are just the same but with an edible medium.”

Needless to say, it’s often a stressful business. Despite spending 80 hours on it, she still cringes at the cake bust she made of Prince William and Kate Middleton in honour of their 2011 wedding. While she took away the title of UK Home Cake Decorator of the Year for the project, created for the Ideal Home Show, she doesn’t feel she quite captured the couple.

She works alone – “If you buy a painting, you expect the artist to have painted it” – and will often forgo sleep to complete a project.

The longest project she has worked on to date was the cake version of the Queen, which took nine days and more than 25kg of sugar paste.

Later this year, she will publish a book that instructs readers on how to make ambitious cakes like hers. While it’s hard to see others matching Wibowo’s ambitious feats, she has already taught groups how to make edible horse’s heads, dogs and pirates and will be heading out on a teaching tour next month, travelling to Zurich, Portugal, Holland and France to give classes in her craft.

It seems a Victoria sponge with jam and cream just doesn’t cut the mustard any more. But Wibowo isn’t precious about her spectacular creations.

While the recipients are often reluctant to take a knife to their cakes, “I’m always encouraging them to get stuck in! After all, why commission something edible if you’re not going to eat it? If you share it and eat it with your friends and loved ones you create a memory and that’s the thing that really lasts.”

*Find out more about Michelle Wibowo and her work at michellesugarart.co.uk.