It’s a pizza! And a cake!! What’s not to like? (The calories)

A five-layer concoction from a Canadian pizzeria has proved a hit with customers, but nutritionists recoil

It is the invention that pizza lovers, but not nutritionists and certainly not gourmet chefs, have been waiting for.

Pizza cake, the creation of Canada’s Boston Pizza chain, has five levels of pizza base and meat topping, stacked up and slathered in cheese to form a deep, sliceable layer cake.

The chain, which asked its customers to vote on a series of “pizza game changers” that had been dreamt up by the company, claims to provide “great food and drink” at 350 branches.

The runaway favourite was pizza cake, voted for by 6,983 customers, and described, with perhaps a shrewd eye to its potential consumers, as “great for birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and even lonely nights watching infomercials”.

It beat “pizza mints”, in second place with 1,057 votes, and was far more popular than inventions such as the pizza-shaped shirt pocket (made in “a polyester-cotton blend to seal in freshness”).

British commentators, however, were less enthusiastic about the cake. Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said: “If this arrived in Britain, I would emigrate. It is a horror.

“The real danger is that there is no portion control. If presented with this, children would go wild. It is stuffed full of calories. It should be banned from Britain.”

Michel Roux Jr, the former MasterChef judge and the chef patron of the two-Michelin-starred Le Gavroche in Mayfair, west London, said: “This sounds wrong, on all fronts. My wife, Giselle, makes wonderful pizza, but if I asked her for pizza cake .… Good Lord, it’s not even worth thinking about. I wouldn’t eat this, or serve it.”

Pizza cake was, however, not completely dismissed by Thom Elliot, who with his brother James runs Pizza Pilgrims in central London, championing the cause of traditional Neapolitan pizza. This Easter weekend, the Elliots are putting a Creme Eggzone (creme egg pizza) on the menu at their Soho restaurant.

“I want to hate it,” he said, “but perhaps I would taste pizza cake and say, ‘You know what? This might work.’ You’ve got to have fun with pizza.

“What was it that Mel Brooks said about sex and pizza? Even when it’s bad, it’s good.”