My brother’s birthday cake.
(No, really!)
This was a fantastic thing to have been asked to do!
My brother’s birthday was coming up & his better half invited me to be in charge of the cake.
Of course, I jumped at the chance & immediately knew what I wanted to do. My brother & I had been fans of the band Rush for the longest time. Neil Peart, the band’s drummer was famous for having two bass drums with matching printed drum skins & I wanted to create something that reflected that.
A bass drum sized cake with a Rush theme!
In 1976 Rush released an album called 2112. (In case you don’t know, that’s “twenty-one twelve’ not “two one one two”.)
The album cover looked like this:
My immediate thought was to adapt the lettering, but I wanted it to do more than that. The neon star is good for the album cover but I needed take it a step further on the cake.
Rush also had a logo that’s generally referred to as the Starman logo.
It looks like this:
What if I removed the hair & put him in welly boots? That would be quite a funny depiction of the man of the hour. Then I remembered… My brother & his partner are mad about their dogs (4 border collies) & do dog agility trials with them.
I needed a dog on this!
What’s more, I needed a dog that took up a similar kind of space as the Starman & I needed it to be funny.
And what’s funnier than a dog catching a frisbie, eh? Answer me that!
The real meat & potatoes of the job for me was creating the lettering to look like that on the album cover then working up the dog photo into the right shape & giving it the stylistic red & black look of the original Starman.
Then came the learning curve.
I knew all about creating the imagery but nothing about cake making.
A 22-inch diameter cake was pretty big. We found someone who was up for the challenge of making the cake but 22-inch diameter cake tins are basically non-existent. I suggested making four 11-inch square cakes, putting them together & cutting away the excess. It was gonna be expensive, but do-able!
The next hurdle was getting the image onto the cake. I’d assumed we’d be laying a normal (but food safe) printout onto the cake & removing it when it came time to cut the cake. But no. It turns out you can get edible prints. Edible prints! Who’d a thunk it? (I knew you could get edible colouring pens because I’d used them on one of my daughters’ cakes some years earlier, but being able to print out imagery in full colour was big news.)
Once again, size was the issue, but we found someone who could print A3 prints, so I liaised with Ellie at Papermill Cakes to make sure I was supplying exactly the right thing & she did the rest.
It all came together beautifully. The end result was incredible. And enormous.
Needless to say, a huge & heartfelt thank you to Mel’s Amazing Cakes in Flintshire, North Wales. Check out more of Mel’s work at:
www.melsamazingcakes.com
Also, a big shout out to Ellie at Papermill Cakes in Walthamstow, London:
www.papermillcakes.co.uk
More photos below.
Neil Peart, 1952–2020
