Snip from NY Times story:
Two years ago, a party planner working for the hip-hop artist Mary J. Blige ordered a birthday cake for her from a Brooklyn baker who had long ago retired his given name – Raven Patrick De'Sean Dennis III – for the shorter if equally titular designation Cake Man Raven.
In celebration of Ms. Blige's 33rd birthday, Mr. Dennis constructed a cake that paid tribute not to any single one of her achievements or affinities, but, ostensibly, to all of them. Four feet wide and 26 inches tall, the cake featured edible approximations of a CD, a musical note, a Dolce & Gabbana shopping bag, a Christian Dior purse, a MAC cosmetics compact, a dove and a near-life-size baby, meant to symbolize Ms. Blige's spiritual rebirth.
Whether by happenstance or design, Cake Man Raven has become the city's most visually strident opponent of the restrained preciousness that has overtaken the baking world. Few would confuse the results of his labor with anything found in Real Simple. Instead, Mr. Dennis's cakes and Mr. Dennis himself – or Cake, as he identifies himself over the phone – have a sense of the epic about them. For the Rev. Al Sharpton, he once made a model of the Bible turned to Timothy 2:15 ("Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved"); for Cab Calloway's 80th birthday, a songbook with a grand piano resting on top; for Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn Borough President, a replica of its Borough Hall, twice. When the rapper Jam Master J died in 2002, he made a cake in the shape of a large Adidas sneaker with a gold chain and two turntables on it.
Link to NYT story (Thanks, Susannah De'Blog Breslin III, aka "cupcake")
Update: Here's the Cake Man's website with more photos: Link (Thanks Beau Brady, and Vanessa)
