Friday 18 February 2011

Fri 17th Feb: Eat The Desingers - AnOther Magazine's 10th birthday celebration

















To celebrate AnOther Magazine's 10th anniversary, 10 fashion designers invented their own vision of a fantasy birthday cake for the occasion. These sketches were dispatched to 10 superior bakers to interpret and deliver something out of the ordinary to a regular batch!!!! Here are just a few of the masterpieces and insight into how they were conjured up in kitchens rather than ateliers:

The lavender tasting Calvin Klein edible mobile was made by Brett Redman from Elilliots. It is an interactive floating installation of individual matchbox size suspended silver foil coated pieces perfectly reflected in the mirrored setting.

The Missoni multicolour marzipan tower cake was made by Caroline Hobkinson who layered cherry, pistacho, raspberry, strawberry, apricot, chocolate and cream to assemble the turrets. (Ive lifted a portrait of Caroline from her site because its so colourful and lush!)

Givenchy took an explicit theme with an X-Rated confectionery creation, which could only be viewed through peep holes. The twisting icing tablo was the work of Simon Smith who answered Ricardo Tisci's instructions for "Dark decadence, sensuality, something that recalls pure pleasure"

Gucci's 3 tiered birthday cake was a life-like set of luggae which sat on the shop floor of Selfridges in camouflage as if it were part of the luxury brands concession of bags. On close inspection you could see that the emblem bags were sewn up in sugar not leather! Andrew Stellitano used liquorice strips, strawberry marshmallow, caramel fringes, pink meringue and silver sugar parline topped off with a biscuit logo. Check out his site for previous Louis Vuitton tortilla chips!!!

After a preview of the cake-off in Selfridges Wonder Room, the celebrations continued downstairs to the basement converted into a Sweet Shop by the ridiculously inventive Bompass & Parr boys. The bar dispensing candy cocktails was built like a Victorian shop counter with shelves stacked with glass jars of penny sweets. Candyfloss, lollipops, chocolate cigarettes and fizzing sherbet were the canapes to accompany the alco-pops poured in novelty shots. The cherry on the top of the cake was delivered as a surprise appearance of performance artist Theo Adams exploding out of the giant white Lanvin cake to entertain the crowd buzzing on sucrose! I think Theo was a genius twist on Alber Albaz reference to 1950's musicals with glamour girls popping out of cake props! Perfect!

To see all 10 designer cakes, head over to AnOther for the full lowdown. (Thanks to Mary Thrift for taking these photos for us)

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