For Berliosca, it all started with the boom box cake for Monte’s 80’s-themed birthday party.

From that portable cassette player, we moved on to an old-fashioned turntable to celebrate Tony’s greatest hits, as well as his 60^th birthday.

The next request was for a more modern turntable—a Pioneer CDJ-2000 to be precise—to celebrate DJ Darkness’ birthday.

After that, AM 650 radio had Berliosca do up another vintage record player for their big anniversary bash.

And just when we thought we were done, we got a request to make yet another turntable, this time a Panasonic SL-1200MK5, to celebrate Paige’s 21^st.

What we loved about this last one was how K was so specific about the extra details on the figurine that represented his girlfriend.

He wanted features like her hat and favourite outfit to be perfect (how many guys out there can identify their girlfriend’s favourite outfit?), and he was particularly careful about making sure the figurine would be as skinny/fit as Paige is (otherwise he’d be in BIG trouble).

Madeline’s aunt contacted Berliosca all the way from New York to order her birthday cake. Happily, the party was in Vancouver, so we didn’t have to worry about shipping logistics.

Panda bears are really important to the family and the cake design was taken from a t-shirt that the little birthday girl was going to wear at the party. (Check out the pictures of both the cake and the t-shirt.)

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Inspiration for a cake really can come from anywhere.

When Lauren contacted me to order a rectangular cake with decoration based on a poster that really just had text on it, we never imagined how special it would turn out to be.

The cake was based on the poster for a documentary film called Helvetica.

Helvetica is an independent feature-length documentary about typography and graphic design, centered around this widely used sans-serif typeface of the same name. Directed by Gary Hustwit, it was released in 2007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the typeface’s introduction. (Thank you Wikipedia.)

As Lauren’s husband is a graphic designer, she came up with the idea to replace some of the letters on the poster with letters spelling out HAPPY BIRTHDAY TANNER..

The only thing she asked was that the font (Helvetica style) be spot on, as typography is Tanner’s big thing. Gulp. It’s a daunting task to please an expert by imitating something within his field of expertise.

Happy ending: Berliosca received the following message in an e-mail: The cake was perfect! Thank you so much. I had no idea it would be exactly like the poster! You are a fabulous cake designer. Many thanks. My husband was thrilled.

I wish I could brag about having the cool idea for this very original cake, but all the credit goes to Lauren.

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We always thought that Halloween would be the occasion for this type of design, but our first pumpkin cake was for an engagement!

Mr. Squash proposed to Ms. Pumpkin, she said yes, and they needed an appropriate cake to celebrate. During the consultation we were really tempted to ask for the story behind their pet names, but a little mystery is nice so we cannot tell you why.

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Just to give you a better idea of the size of this cake, the board is 18″ X 18″ (45.7 cm X 45.7 cm). Huge.

Both real-size pumpkin and acorn squash were carved out of vanilla cake and milk chocolate ganache.

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Most baby showers I go to (or make cakes for) have baby cute themes in pastel colours. The request for this cake was slightly different since it was for a more fancy-fashion type of event.

I loved that the client’s first words when she saw the cake were: Wow, that’s classy!

I learn a lot when researching the cakes I make. For example, I’ve learned about everything from juvenile arthritis to 3-D animation techniques because of cake requests. I have also dissected a tiger lily in the name of cake-science. This summer, thanks to an 11-year-old Titanic aficionado, I learned that contrary to our image of fluorescent-orange life vests, the actual vests worn by Titanic passengers were a light salmon hue. I imagine that 11-year-old Evan and I were the only ones who cared about this detail on the Titanic cake, but these are the things that keep me up at night.

Who knew that cakes could be so educational?