In Pictures: Crowds Queue For Covent Garden Cupcake

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They came, they saw, they gobbled. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people brought a corner of Covent Garden to a standstill today as they waited for their slice of the world's largest cupcake.

The giant cake positively glistened in the midday sun enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame, insensible as the cow at an abbatoir to its fate, while scores of onlookers with lips well licked and napkins stuffed into collars took in the scene with ravenous eyes.

Just gone 1pm, a knife was produced, and the first slice cut. By this point the sizeable crowd had formed into a more orderly queue, one that stretched beyond the London Transport Museum and out of the piazza. The ladies on slice-duty had their work cut out to feed them all -- and by the time we left the scene at 1.30pm, they'd yet to really make much of a dent into the cake's hefty flank.

And how did the cake taste? A sample of opinions ranged from "great!" to "a bit mealy" to "the icing was nice", and we suspect that the young gent who described it as "the best lunch I've ever had" is either a sarky bugger or normally fed on a drip-feed. Our verdict was that, as cakes go, it was decent enough, though without the auspicious provenance it wouldn't normally be a morsel we'd remember for posterity.