via Karen PortaleoIt's the Dowager Countess as you've never seen her before—in cake form! Just what you've always wanted/dreaded: Behold this bust of Maggie Smith in her Downton Abbey guise made of cake.
This baked Dowager Countess was made for a season five premiere event hosted by Georgia Public Broadcasting and held The Fox Theater in Atlanta. According to the cake's creator, Karen Portaleo, the edible Downton Abbey bust was made of vanilla cake and buttercream with an Earl Grey tea soak. The cake was completed in 18 hours.
Watch the creation of the cake in the video below set to a remix of the Downton Abbey theme song.
Downton Abbey returned for a fifth season in the US on Sunday, Jan. 4. The show has already been renewed for a sixth. Will it be its last?
"In my heart of hearts, I can't see it going more than two more," Allen Leech, Branson on Downton Abbey, told E! News. "I think the period of time we want to tell, we're coming to the end that us as actors we can keep playing these characters. Maggie Smith turned to me on one of our last days of filming this season and said, 'I must be 196 years old by now. What's in the water here?'" Leech recalled in an amazingly accurate impersonation of the acting legend. "I said, 'I don't know, Maggie,' and she goes, 'It's ridiculous. I should have been dead years ago.'"
This isn't the first time a living legend has become a cake. Betty White got her own cake courtesy of Cake Boss, 30 Rock's Meat Cat was turned into a cake by Food Network's Ace of Cakes and there have been life-sized cakes made of Jennifer Lawrence's The Hunger Games character, Peter Dinklage's Game of Thrones character and Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean.
Downton Abbey airs Sundays, 9 p.m. on PBS.