Graubünden was always going to be the hardest canton. How do you make grey delicious? For three weeks, that question lived on my worktable.
The villages of the Engadin are built from stone and slate, whitewashed walls carved with sgraffito patterns, roofs that hold snow like a held breath. Nothing about this palette says “cake”. Everything about it says “home” — at least to the people who live there, and increasingly to me.
I started, as always, with the visit. Four days in Guarda and Ardez, photographing rooftops from church towers, tracing sgraffito spirals with my finger, eating nusstorte in every café that would have me. The sketchbook filled with greys: slate grey, snow-shadow grey, woodsmoke grey.
Two hundred shingles
Back in the atelier, the roof became the heart of the piece. Tempered dark chocolate, rolled thin, cut into two hundred individual shingles — each one slightly different, because real roofs are never regular. Laying them took two days and one entire audiobook.
A cake stops being a cake the moment you stop counting the hours.
The sgraffito walls were the discovery of the project so far: a layer of soft charcoal-tinted sugar paste over white, carved back with a scribe tool so the pattern appears in white from beneath — exactly the technique the Engadin builders use, five centuries old, translated into sugar.
What grey tastes like
Inside, the answer to the grey question: pear, walnut and caramel — the flavours of a Bündner nusstorte, layered into a cake that tastes the way those valleys feel. When the piece was finally cut at a private viewing in Chur, a woman from Scuol told me it tasted like her grandmother's kitchen. That sentence is the entire reason this project exists.
Next on the wall of pins: Appenzell. I have a feeling it will involve very small, very patient embroidery — in royal icing.