I wanted to first thank Candace Chand for inviting me into the collaboration earlier in the year. I am feeling loads of gratitude for being included alongside a lovely team of sugar artists.

The piece I chose to recreate in sugar was the Goddess Lakshmi.

Lakshmi is the household goddess of most Hindu families. Although she is worshipped daily, the festive month of October is special.There is an important ritual during the festival of Diwali that is performed to invite Goddess Lakshmi into your home. After a time spent purifying and cleaning your home, a platform is created that features many components of the Lakshmi puja. Prayers and gifts are offered to the Goddess asking that the New Year is blessed with peace, wealth, and prosperity.

Her four hands represent the four ends of human life: righteousness, desires, wealth, and liberation from the cycle of birth and death. Her top hands hold a half open Lotus and full bloom Lotus, representing beauty, purity and fertility. The Goddess is shown dropping gold coins on the ground, near where you see an owl sitting. The dropping of coins represents prosperity and the owl represents perversion of attitudes in material prosperity. In her clothing, the colour red symbolizes activity and the golden lining, prosperity. The elephants are shown half emerging from a symbolic ocean and bestowing a showering of wisdom, purity and charity. Finally, the Goddess is shown sitting on a lotus. Her posture symbolises to "live in the world, but do not be possessed by the world".

The Goddess sits on an 8” chocolate cake, carved with an exaggerated bevel and ganached. The top half was then covered with a layer of modelling chocolate petals painted in edible gold, and the bottom half with modelling chocolate mosaics in two different shades. The Goddess herself is made from modelling chocolate and hand painted with pale gold food approved pure lustre by Caroline’s Sugar Art Services.

All the jewelled detailing on her outfit was created using a variety of piping tips to either emboss or punch out. No effort was wasted as you can see her belt and trouser details made use of the punched out offcuts. The elephants and owl are totally hand sculpted.

What took the longest, funnily enough, were the golden coins, which were punched out modelling chocolate. I wanted all the texture to be uniform so it was worth the extra effort. I also wanted to have coins spilling from her hand, as illustrated in pictures of the Goddess - so I teased the idea of this with the help of a thin strip of acetate.

The final piece was mounted on a large cake board to accommodate the candles which I placed around her.