Originally staged in her Acme prefabricated house in Stepney, East London, in 1976, the remake of the sculptural installation, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, accompanied the touring exhibition Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 at Tate Britain and the Whitworth. This major recreated artwork contains five life-size sculptures of family members made from cake, biscuits and meringues, which were steadily eaten by the public until not a crumb remained. 

The 1976 installation was presented in Baker’s actual prefabricated mobile home – one of a handful of prefabs that arts organisation Acme were providing for artists as live/work spaces.

Alongside the refurbished dressmaker’s dummy mother, the figures of a daughter, son, husband, and baby are made out of garibaldi biscuits, meringue, and various flavours of cake (including a vegan option). The house is papered floor-to-ceiling in newspaper pages and magazine clippings dated to the mid-seventies adorned with icing decorations. In the bathroom, appropriately dated music from the era emanates from a vintage radio and in the sitting room the father watches 1970s comedy on TV.

An Edible Family in a Mobile Home had not been seen for almost 50 years until the first restaging of a replica in 2023 outside Tate Britain. Following a period of research with the UCL’s Institute for Making, Baker used a contemporary icing to decorate the walls of the house, while the building’s structure was slightly adapted to improve accessibility.  For the Whitworth, the structure required renovation and redecoration, re-icing and new partnerships for what would be the final-ever presentation.

Baker originally staged her installation aged 25 over the course of a week. Visitors ate pieces of her cake ‘family’ and Baker served cups of tea, performing the role of polite female host. In the living room, a father made of fruit cake was slumped in an armchair surrounded by tabloid newspapers; in the bath, a teenage son made of garibaldi biscuits lay in chocolate cake bathwater against a background of comics; and in the kitchen, a mother constructed from a dressmaker’s mannequin with a teapot for a head offered a constant supply of fairy cakes, sandwiches and fruit from compartments in her hollow abdomen. Baker baked, sculpted and decorated each of these family members herself over the course of a month. 

At the Whitworth, cakes were baked by Manchester’s women-owned and women-run Long Boi's Bakehouse. Assembled by Baker and her team, visitors were invited into the house to sample the edible sculptures and talk to the ‘hosts’. The hosts, specially trained by Baker, were students from the University of Manchester. A run of 7 weeks mirrored the original 7 days, over the course of which we welcomed an astonishing 4, 348 visitors. Fresh meringues and vegan chocolate ‘bathwater’ cake were delivered weekly to meet visitor demand.

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Additional support has been secured from Acme, and People's Postcode Lottery.