Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Cake - Melbourne Cake Club - Sensational Song Cakes

This month's Melbourne Cake Club theme is Song Cakes.  The Cake Club met on a cold night at Lady Grange in St Kilda to exchange cakes inspired by our favourite songs.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album by The Beatles, so I decided to make a cake inspired by the title song.  The drum skin for Sgt Pepper is iconic, and being round, is the perfect shape for a cake.

I tossed up about making a cake containing pepper as the base cake, but figured that might not turn out well, so instead, I focussed on the psychedelia that went with the Sgt Pepper era, and made a psychedelic zebra cake from this recipe from The Cake Mistress:

The challenge then was how to recreate something at least resembling the graphic art on the Sgt Pepper drum skin.  Originally, I thought about getting an edible icing transfer, but I have used one of those in the past and couldn't get it off the backing paper, so I skipped that. 

My next thought was to use all fondant, so I bought rolled fondant in all of the Sgt Pepper colours.  I hit a snag when I went to actually decorate the cake, as I found that my letter cutters were too big to cut out all of the wording in fondant.  Also, the multiple layers of colours would have made the icing too bulky if everything was made of fondant, so on the go, I opted for a mixture of fondant and edible markers to produce the design:

It's not perfect, but in the end, I think it turned out pretty well. It was definitely a learning on the go experience, and I had to make a few of the pieces more than once.  A trick that I picked up from Whimiscal Cakehouse class that I  used in decorating this cake was that if you smudge colour onto white icing, you can dab it off with a little milk on a cotton ball or bud.  (The blue rings smudged a little as I was placing them, but the milk dab did the trick to remove the unwanted colour bleed.)

And here's a peek inside the cake:

At Lady Grange, in keeping with The Beatles vibe, I ordered a Penny Lane cocktail (vodka, coconut, peach, watermelon):

(Incidentally, Penny Lane was recorded at the same time as Sgt Pepper, but was released as a double A side with Strawberry Fields instead of making it onto the album.)

Club members had a terrific time seeing what everyone else had made, and we all had very different inspiration.

Abi made an Over the Rainbow cake, complete with lemon drops spelling out melting "Troubles", and a bluebird over a rainbow layer cake sandwiched with vanilla buttercream and lemon curd:

Sue made a gluten free, fudgy mocha Count Down cake, with the Count Down logo emblazoned in cachous on top of the cake:

Alex made banana, mango and macadamia muffins, inspired by the tropical sound of Mr President's Coco Jumbo:

Dalya sings You Are My Sunshine to her daughter, so she made a delicious lemon and almond sunshine cake:

Last but not least, Karen made a cake inspired by The Bangles' Eternal Flame, being banana and raspberry cake with orange icing to mimick the colour of flames and decorated with modelling chocolate:

So there you have it - our sensational song cakes!

If you would like to join us in August, our theme is Magic Cakes - the details are here.

Lady Grange

1 Fitzroy St

St Kilda VIC 3182

Phone: (03) 9534 3056