Aroundtown MEETS
Justin Bieber Cake
Runway Cake Photograph: Adele Hannah
hand-crafted flowers and pearls to create the stunning bride. Turning her talents back to
fashion, Debbie also created the world’s most expensive shoes valued at £11.7million for the same Dubai cake client, this time featuring rare pink and blue diamonds plus 1,000 white pointer diamonds in the quilted 24ct gold painted design. While her name is now
Future Of Fashion Academy
notorious within the luxury sector, Debbie still has plenty she wants to achieve and projects she’s looking to develop including her Future of Fashion academy which she launched in 2013. To inspire the next generation
of creatives and offer opportunities for young people aged seven to 16, the project has helped 5,000 kids so far progress in their fashion careers. Based worldwide with
‘‘Echoes of the Yorkshire anthem of ‘Ow Much? stunned Debbie into silence. £48.5million to be precise... A third entry into the World Record books for Debbie and a promotion to cake expert to the stars’’
Arabian Bride Cake
a challenge, so it was never going to be your typical eight-inch round with a character on the top – that’s just not my thing. Instead, we combined fashion with cake and created a six-foot runway with special effects built in.” The cake took over 1,100 hours
to create, which, based on an average full-time working week, is over 31 weeks of designing, baking, sculpting and finessing. It weighed over 450kg – around
the same weight as a male grizzly bear – and included edible props and models along with smoke,
music and lighting. But of course, the brilliance
didn’t stop there. “Two weeks before deadline, I
had a phone call saying ‘You’re the diamond girl, could you put a few diamonds on the cake?’ The client owned a portfolio of jewellery that they wanted to gift their daughter for her birthday and engagement. “The next phone call was from
the jeweller asking me if I was sitting down before reeling off a list of items longer than me in heels.” Echoes of the Yorkshire anthem
of ‘Ow Much? stunned Debbie into silence. £48.5million to be precise. Along with emeralds and
amethysts, the list of 4,000 items included a 5.2ct pink diamond, 6.4ct yellow diamond plus 15 flawless 5ct white diamonds. The frosting was speckled with 76 2ct black diamonds and 62 2ct white diamonds. A third entry into the World
Record books for Debbie and a promotion to cake expert to the stars. While it had taken her 15
years to build up a reputation in haute couture, Debbie saw sweet success in just three years for her cakes, racking up a range of clients from Justin Bieber to Drake while also having her own published magazine columns and TV shows. She has recently hit the news
again with her first realism piece and favourite cake to date, the million dollar Arabian bride. This full size life-like creation weighed over 100kg, using 1,000 eggs, 20kg of modeling chocolate, 50kg of lace fondant and 5,000
aroundtownmagazine.co.uk 7
programmes in Europe and the USA, Future of Fashion is one of Debbie’s main focuses as she looks to expand even further afield. She has also written a book,
From Coal Dust to Diamonds, which gives an uncut view into the highs and lows of her 18-year journey and will be available in stores across the UK later this year. Her career might have taken
her around the world from Dubai and Qatar to Russia and the Ukraine, Monte Carlo and Marbella to New York, San Francisco and LA; but it is crystal clear she’s still a Yorkshire girl at heart and hasn’t let fame or fashion change her. “I believe that whatever
industry you are in, if you’re committed, passionate and interested then you are already half way there. We all have bad days but I try and use these as an incentive to keep pushing forward, breaking down any goals I have into smaller, achievable sections of the bigger picture. “I’ve never let the industry
define me – I am who I am and I won’t change for anyone.”
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