Birthdays are traditionally a celebration of life, but Sydney man Milton Lai apparently has a death wish.

Not content to celebrate his latest trip around the calendar with a traditional birthday cake, Lai set out instead to mark the occasion with something rather more disgusting.

“The fast food cake has been on my mind for a while now,” Lai wrote on his blog.

He said examples of KFC cakes he’d seen were usually just “fanciful display[s] of chicken. I set myself the goal to create the proper fast food cake, with a few rules to keep it ‘authentic’”.

He decided that the cake had to be “structurally sound without props” and “must slice nicely and be eaten as a slice and NOT pulled apart”. It had to “present nicely as a cake and not as a slop or heap of junk food”.

Most importantly, the cake had to consist entirely of food from fast food outlets.

And so, with a gleam in his eye, $120 in his pocket and a shopping list – or should that be shocking list? – that would cause most nutritionists to resign in protest, Lai headed out into the world one evening to amass the ingredients that would go into his masterpiece:

• 6 McDonald’s double cheese burgers
• 4 large McDonald’s fries
• 50 McNuggets
• 3 large Domino’s pizzas
• 1 KFC family feast
  • 15 pieces of chicken
  • 2 large serves of potato and gravy
  • 2 large chips (not used)
  • 10 wicked wings (not used)

He started with the base: a deep-dish pizza from Domino’s.

A double layer of chicken McNuggets – something McDonald’s itself recently admitted were full of additives that they’re hoping to remove – were then stacked around the perimeter of the pizza. This “chicken nugget fortress” was then filled with McDonalds fries.

A thin crust pizza was then added on top “to help with the ‘tiered’ cake look,” before six McDonald’s double cheese burgers were arranged “kissing the crust” around its surface.

A thin crust pepperoni pizza – thin because, as Lai so memorably put it, “I think we have enough pizza dough” – crowned the burgers. The KFC chicken, in its turn, was used to crown the pizza.

And this is where Lai almost came undone.

“The flaw in this is that you cannot eat this as a slice due to bones,” he wrote on his blog.“You could debone [the chicken], but [we] presented [it] as more of a garnish on top, similar to a cherry, which you would use your hands for.”

Make that a double garnish. There was still one more step to go: “Gravy the boys up and (s)mash the middle,” Lai wrote.

The cake was not as structurally sound as Lai would have liked, he admitted on the blog. While the burgers and nugget layers held up, “the chicken on top gave way”.

Nevertheless, “it was a success in my eyes and everyone elses [sic] eyes (and stomaches) [also sic],” he wrote. “I’d like to leave this out there for … others to top, with improved heights and grander designs [a whole different kind of sic].”

Lai said the cake fed 10 people comfortably, with each slice “similar to a large entree [or] small main”. At 5400 calories each, however – a little over two-and-a-half times the recommended daily intake – we reckon it’s rather more than that.

And to think that Lai didn’t think to mention how his birthday blow-out actually tasted.