Sawt Falasteen - 121 metre long cake gives a taste for records

Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect.

The effort overtook a 100.48m (329 ft 7 in) long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019.

El Gatou's cake also used 350 kilogrammes of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of cream.

To claim the record in the Guiness book, the cake had to be at least eight centimetres wide and eight centimetres tall. The logistics were so difficult that the team "used blowtorches to heat the bowl" for the cream mix, said the chef's wife Nadia El Gatou.

El Gatou said that since a child he had wanted to set a record.

"I was looking for a product, or a French pastry, and I also wanted to highlight farm produce, so French strawberries and products like milk, cream and butter," he told AFP.

Residents of Argenteuil who went to see the calorie packed record-breaker on Wednesday were given a piece to take away.

I.Yassin--SF-PST