It’s strawberry season, and nothing says strawberry season like making the world’s largest strawberry cake. It happened in a northern suburb of Paris on Wednesday, where French pastry chefs led by Youssef El Gatou, owner of pastry shop La Maison Heloise, used truckloads of sugar, creme, strawberries and eggs in the production of a magnifique 121.88 metre ( 399 feet and 8 inches) long strawberry shortcake.

How’s this for a shopping list? 771 pounds of strawberries, check. 330 pounds of sugar. And to top it off … 4,000 eggs! 20 chefs took a week to complete the over 2,500 pound cake, which, to be eligible to claim the record for largest cake in the Guinness book, had to be at least 3.14 inches wide and 3.14 inches tall. The logistics of creating something this large required innovative methods, such as using blowtorches to heat the bowl for the cream mix.

Chef El Gatou told French international news agency AFP that he had wanted to set a record ever since he was a child. "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 said. When the record-setting cake had, well, set, it was placed out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil for official record-checkers and curious residents to inspect. Each person who came was, of course, sent home with a piece of the cake.

Senior writer Chris DeWeese edits Morning Brief, The Weather Channel’s newsletter.