I used to think that the most requested cake designs were sports-related. For one thing, there are just a dizzying number of sports out there. I don’t even know how many basketball, baseball and football cakes I’ve made. Too many, to be sure. But now I’m beginning to think that music themes have overtaken sports. Let’s face it, many people aren’t interested in sports. Two of them live in my house! But who doesn’t love music? Even painfully tone-deaf people often walk around happily belting out their favourite tunes.

At first glance, music seems to be a pretty easy cake theme. You really just need five black lines for a staff and a random smattering of notes to get the idea across. Never one to take the easy route, for this cake board I copied a piece of music onto a sheet of fondant using edible marker. Three hours, that took. That’s before I even got started on the actual violin cake.

OK, simple enough, but what if your staff needs to circle the sides of your cake? And your lines need to be exactly evenly-spaced? Well good luck to you, is all I can say. In this early attempt from years ago, I actually used black icing to copy the sheet music to Mendelssohn’s wedding march. Not a single guest noticed.

Did that stop me from recreating Fagin’s signature song in this Oliver! cake? You bet it didn’t.

Fine, so clearly this method is too messy and unsuccessful. Next I tried using lines of fondant and carefully placing them side by side.

Much more successful, but way too tedious and time consuming for an average result. On another occasion, I printed out a sheet of music on edible paper and cut it up to interesting effect. But that solution wouldn’t work for every project.

It was time to admit defeat and buy myself some help.

Now it’s true that today’s cake is only dotted with a few notes here and there, but we’re just getting our feet wet here. Somehow I’m pretty confident there are scores of music cakes in my future.