Chef creates 500-kilogramme cake

Spanish pastry chef Marc Suárez spent four months creating a 3.5-metre-tall wedding cake weighing 500 kilogrammes.

Commissioned by a Saudi family for a royal wedding, the cake took 1,800 hours to make and features 33,000 handmade sugar-paste petals, branches and flowers. Suárez, who usually works alone, brought in pastry-chef friends and their families to help.

The cake was unveiled at the Palais Garnier in Paris and was designed to look more like a monument than a traditional wedding cake.

Surprisingly, only 0.1% of the creation is actual cake. The rest is made from sugar paste and white chocolate.

AI creates unusual Japanese desserts

Japanese convenience stores are using AI to create unusual new snacks and desserts. Lawson will launch a pickle-flavoured lemon tart and a bread roll filled with red bean paste, margarine and yoghurt cream this month in Tokyo and nearby areas. The products were developed through AI brainstorming around the idea, “What on earth is this? But it’s delicious.”

Rival chain FamilyMart used AI and sales data to develop a sweet potato canelé topped with caramel sauce, which will launch nationwide next week. AI was used mainly for ideas, while human specialists handled product development. After an earlier AI-created milk-cream biscuit sandwich proved successful, FamilyMart plans to develop more AI-inspired products.

Teen loses hearing after cicadas

An 18-year-old boy in China suffered temporary hearing loss after spending more than four hours near hundreds of loud cicadas while camping in Ningbo, Zhejiang.

The cicadas became louder around noon. By evening, the boy had ringing and a blocked feeling in his ears and could no longer hear birds or his phone notifications.

Doctors found swelling in both ears and prescribed medicine. He was told to avoid loud sounds for 14 days, and his hearing fully recovered after two weeks.

Doctors warn that although one cicada usually produces less than 70 decibels, a large group can exceed 85 decibels, a level that can damage hearing. Short-term exposure may cause temporary swelling in the ear’s hair cells, but severe damage can be permanent.

World’s oldest competitive skateboarder

California’s Judi Oyama has extended her Guinness World Record as the oldest female competitive skateboarder, competing at age 66.

Oyama was 66 years and 25 days old when she competed at the 2025 International Slalom Skateboarding World Championships in Brazil in November.

She first set the record at 64 in 2024. Oyama has been skateboarding since she was 13, began competing professionally in 1975 and entered the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2018.

She plans to compete again in October at the World Skate Games, hoping to extend her record once more.

Published in Dawn, Young World, September 19th, 2026