Before we begin, there are a few things you should know.

1. Along with the Second World War and the 1966 World Cup final, the British are weirdly obsessed with caterpillar-themed children’s birthday cakes. Despite the lawsuit, most large UK supermarkets have one.
2. Some time around 2022, Sainsbury’s sold a longer version of their regular “Wiggles” cake, called “Wiggles the Mega Caterpillar”.
3. The existence of “Mega Wiggles” implies the existence of Wiggles at other SI prefixes, such as Giga Wiggles and Tera Wiggles.

The plausibility of Wiggles up to the 10²⁶ scale were explored in the paper “Noby Noby Boy” (K Takahashi, 2009, PlayStation 3). (Image credit: Eurogamer)

Sainsbury’s “Mega Wiggles” run lasted only a short time, and all record of it seems to have disappeared from the internet. But we remember.

Since Mega Wiggles had all but disappeared, it seemed unlikely that the company would ever produce a Giga Wiggles or above. (However, they did later release a lunchbox-sized “mini Wiggles”, filling in the range of possibilities in the milli- to micro-Wiggles range.)

Naturally then, it came up in conversation: should we make one?

Now all my previous attempts at Swiss Roll have been frustrating and prone to cracking, so I was hoping to avoid having to make another, particularly on a large scale. But an alternative idea was pitched: normal Wiggles (and friends) are easily available—what if we just combined them?

What if we just fucking “human centipede”d a bunch of caterpillar cakes together, tore their faces off, chocolated over the gaps, and somehow served it?

The Carpentry

While Keita Takahashi might have explored the extremes of the Wiggles spectrum, I would be limited to what I could realistically serve to a table full of people. Each caterpillar cake comes with its own flimsy cardboard base, but there’s no way I was going to be able to attach them together in any safe way. I needed a more stable base.

Now the male of homo sapiens has a curious biological quirk which causes them to stash largely unnecessary bits of wood in a self-made structure that scientists refer to as a “shed”. In my case I had the slats from an old single bed piled up in the corner. These are 90cm long, giving an upper limit to the number of caterpillar cakes involved in the Gigawiggles to approximately 3.5.

They’re also a bit too thin to support the cakes nicely, so I needed two of them side-by-side. A small amount of woodwork was therefore required, taking a third slat and chopping it up into pieces to use as supports for the others.

Wood that’s been sitting in my shed for five years isn’t exactly sanitary, so a quick covering of tin foil sorted that out, and produced for sure the largest cake board I have ever used—and the only one I have ever built by hand!

The Caterpillars

Rather than do this the “simple” way with four identical Wiggles cakes, we decided to up the difficulty slightly and use four different cakes: Sainsbury’s Wiggles, the O.G. M&S Colin the Caterpillar, Tesco’s Slinky, Waitrose’s Cecil.

Now not all caterpillar cakes are created equal, and that unfortunately extends to their diameter. Having extracted them from their original boards, we arranged them on the Gigawiggles board in a sensible-looking order, having removed the faces of all but the first, and used some melted chocolate to try and cover the gaps between the cakes. The last caterpillar would have overhung the 3.5-caterpillar-cake board (new SI unit just dropped??) so it was cut in half.

Chocolate to cover the gaps was not a huge success; we melted and cooled the chocolate but it cooled a bit too fast, and by the time we came to filling the third gap, it had taken on that grainy texture as it prepared to turn solid again. The colour also didn’t blend particularly well with any of the caterpillars. But who cares, really—the job was done.

The Reveal

The Gigawiggles took four years long from concept to execution, so we were able to turn it into a 40th birthday cake and of course we completed it with 40 candles all down the spine of the beast.

And then, the Gigawiggles was served. We sang our traditional birthday song, though one of our friends did suggest some sort of sinister chanting might have been more appropriate.

Happy birthday. Now let us never speak of this creation again.