Brie
Howard Darling - From Rock Star To Cake Diva
Brie
Howard Darling - From Rock Star To Cake Diva
Have
you ever fantasized about holding Jimmy Page’s double neck guitar in your hands?
Now you can, sort of. Brie Darling
Cakes replicated one of Page’s guitars as a cake and you can eat everything
including the guitar strings. Although, you will not be holding the entire cake,
because it is life size, you will be holding a piece of it in your hands, so go
out and tell your friends. It is not the first instrument that Darling and her
team have replicated as they also reproduced in delicious form, a harmonica.
“I did a cake for a friend of mine Ted Andreadis and it
was a harmonica cake. It was a Hohner harmonica and it made me so happy, because
of the detail. I carved all of the little things that are carved into the metal
(of the harmonica). It had the key that the harmonica was in and then I decided
to go the extra mile and I cut up a cake box and I made it look like the Hohner
harmonica box. I love it when they
turn out great and it blew his mind. He loved it. I went that extra mile to make
it just right. That is what I love and that’s why I don’t want to get cranky
pants about the money, because for me that is purely the enjoyment of getting it
to a place where it will blow the recipient’s mind and it will blow the mind of
whoever sees it, while making everybody uncomfortable, because they will have to
cut into it. I have no problem with that. I love it that you have to destroy it
to enjoy it. I don’t know why I have no attachment to it. I also paint and you
have to get it just right or it is going to sit there on paper or canvass
forever. With cakes you do it, you
take a shot, you take a picture and it’s gone. There is something about it that
is freeing,” says Brie Howard Darling, as she is also referred to in the music
business.
Starting something from scratch and building it into a
successful venture comes naturally to Darling, as she was one of the founding
members of Fanny, which was the first all-female Rock band (late 1960s and
1970s) to be signed by a major record label. She played the drums and sang in
Fanny and later she would be the lead singer for the band American Girls. She
has toured the world with and recorded in the studio with some of the biggest
names in music, Carole King, Roger Daltry, Keith Moon and Ringo Starr to name
just a few.
After watching cake shows on television starting about
five years ago, Brie Howard Darling thought “I can do that!”
“I have been artistic all of my life, mostly visual, but
I love writing and I love music, but visual is my thing. I had never made a cake
before or decorated one. I think I helped my daughter do one and it was pretty
cute, but it was amateurish. I wanted this one to be like the ones I saw on TV.
This is something that I do, I decide I can do something and then after I take
on the commitment I panic and I go what the hell was I thinking? Underlining all
of that is the confidence in knowing that I can do it. I decided I was going to
make this cake and I thought maybe I should take a course. There was a little
mom and pop cake supply place close by that was really inexpensive and they gave
instruction. I thought I would just take a course or two. I did that and my very
first cake was a failure, but only because I decided I was going to make a cake
for a friend of mine who was having a baby and I wanted to do this oval shape
screaming head and with a baby hat on. I made a red velvet cake and I thought
that would be neat. I iced it with buttercream.
I didn’t realize that the red velvet stain was coming through the buttercream,
so after half of a day this cake had a rash on its cheeks.
I never ended up giving it to him and I don’t think I ever told him that
he was the inspiration for starting to do it.
I took the class and I excelled in it really fast,
because I have a really strong background in art. My daughter, my granddaughter
Storm and her nanny all sat in the class together just having a ball just taking
these classes and doing them together. It turned into a neat sharing of artistic
expression and out of that I accidentally got orders. I never planned to have a
cake business. People started asking me to do it
and so it turned into its own little business.
The part that I enjoy about it the most is the artistic
expression. Hardly any of the cakes look alike. Every once in a while something
will carry over, because someone will like a guitar cake, so I will do another
guitar cake, but it is different. With these cakes someone will ask me to do
something and I am very fortunate, because people will say, oh no, you make it
like you want. You do it like you see it. I love
that, because it gives me an idea to start with, but then I get free reign to
create what I want and I like that a lot. On
average there are two weeks where I just let it develop in my brain and I will
wake up in the middle of the night and I will go, that’s what I have to do or
oh, this is what will make this work better. It
happens constantly and I love that part of it.
It is very time consuming and then to pull off those ideas and making
them work is really labor intensive.
I love doing it, but at the same time sometimes I get all cranky
pants, because I will work really hard on something and monetarily it doesn’t
pay me enough for how much I put into it. I don’t want to feel bad about it. I
enjoy creating the art, but there has to be a balance somewhere. My next step is
to try and make it work and I have some ideas,” she says.
Some cakes, such as the guitar ones are almost life size
and therefore present some logistical issues getting them to their final
destination, so they are transported in sections. Brie Howard Darling also says
sometimes people will visit the website for Brie Darling Cakes and they do not
realize how big they are and they will assume the guitar cakes are smaller,
wanting to order one for a party of about 25 to 30 people. She then has to
advise them that those cakes actually can feed up to 150 people.
“Now I have come up with doing them slightly different
so that I can make smaller versions that are still spectacular.
That is the kind of problem solving that I like. I like being forced to
come up with a different way to do something that is just as cool if not cooler.
The thing I like the most is the problem solving and the engineering.
That’s just fun for me,” says Darling.
Brie Howard Darling has a dedicated cake studio at her home, right next to her
husband producer, sound engineer, musician, singer and songwriter, Dave
Darling’s recording studio.
“Before I did this I had never baked anything in my life. I don’t cook. Dave is
the cook. Dave is a fantastic cook and he went to chef school. He used to work
as a chef and I am a lousy cook. I felt very confident about the artistic part.
Even though I don’t cook I believe that I have a really good palette and I love
the food. I decided to take a couple of courses, because I wanted to have a bit
of a background in what I was doing. I started with a great chocolate cake
recipe that I found and people loved it. Then I saw something that I thought
looked interesting on the internet and I made that and people went nuts for it.
That is the only chocolate cake that I make now, because it is so good. Until I
find one that can beat it, that’s my guy.
I don’t have a huge
repertoire, but what I do is killer. There are still a couple of recipes that I
am looking for (and one is) to have a perfect white cake with the right
consistency, but I do have some in my arsenal. People tell me (my cakes) are
some of the best cakes they have ever tasted. They say the buttercream icing
that I use is some of the best buttercream. I love that. That is my go to guy
now. That’s it,” says Darling.
The Brie Darling Cakes also come with a special surprise
once you cut into the cake. 
“When I was taking those cake classes I got the idea
that I wanted the design on the inside as well as the outside.
I thought why not leopard skin. I had never seen it and I thought I am
just going to figure out how to do this. It took me a year to figure out how to
do it consistently and to make it work.
Cake batter is not dependable and it does what it wants to do, depending
on the recipe you use, depending on the weather, depending on if you bake it
just a little bit longer or a little bit shorter. I have it down now and I can
make amazing leopard print cakes consistently. It takes me just about three
hours to make one cake and that is just the cake without decorating it. To me it
is worth doing it, because when people get it, they flip out. Now that I have
worked that out I have to figure out how to make it worth all of the time that I
put into it, so I don’t get so exhausted doing it by the time it is completely
decorated inside and outside that it is not a bummer.
We have done a bunch of things. We did a Cinco de Mayo
cake. The fun thing too is one thing inspires another thing. Most of the Rock
and Roll cakes are leopard inside, because it works.
You cut into your cake, whether it is round, whether it is square,
whether it is shaped like a guitar and you can see it. There is a section on my
website called inside outside and it shows that when you cut into the cake, it
is leopard skin. It looks like a leopard print and I think it is pretty
remarkable. I want to expand into some other shapes and I will have to figure
out how to do it. I want to do a hound’s-tooth print inside a cake. I say that
and I have no idea how I am going to do it, but I know I can do it. I just need
to figure out how to do it and then do it. One of the first designs that I did
inside was for a friend of mine who loves dogs. When you cut into (the cake)
there was a dog bone on the inside.
It was a chocolate cake with a white dog bone. To be honest with you I don’t
even remember how I did that. I love it when people see the cake and they say oh
my God this is fantastic and they cut into it and they freak out, because there
is another surprise inside. Then they taste it and then they go holy crap this
is the best cake that I have ever tasted. Then I’m happy,” she says.
Brie Howard Darling was born in northern California and
before she turned two years old the family moved to Alaska and then when she was
eight years old they moved to Sacramento, California. She finished her high
school there before as she says, “I ran away with a Rock and Roll band.” While
she was still in high school she became a member of the all-girl group Svelts in
1966, which eventually morphed into Fanny the first all-female Rock band to be
signed by a major record label.
“I was seventeen years old and I was playing in a band.
The band kind of broke up. I had a boyfriend who was playing guitar and he was
connected with a manager in Sacramento. They turned me onto this band that was
looking for a drummer, because they had just lost their girl drummer. They asked
me if I would join them. I did and that was one of the most influential things
musically and otherwise in my life. I guess everything influences you, but when
you are that young and you are creating something that nobody else is doing and
you have this goal….(she changes
direction mid-sentence as she talks about something she is passionate about)
this is something that I have found about bands, they become my lifelong
friends, because you have something that all of you want. You all want it and
you all want it the same. You bust your butt for
it and you fight about it. You work at it and you beat it to death. You laugh
about it and you got through hardships together. You give up other parts of your
life and relationships, whatever and there is a bonding that happens when you
have a goal together. You are not just in a band, but you have something in
common with somebody for the rest of your life. That was like fifty years ago
and that bond is still there. They are somewhere between family and friends and
maybe they kind of overlap the two. It’s a cool thing,” she says.
Between 1966 and 1972 Brie Howard Darling was in and out
of what started out as the Svelts and ended up being Fanny, some of the changes
were due to getting married and some of them, because she gave birth to her
daughter.
During one of the times when Darling was not a part of
Fanny she sat in on one of their gigs at Filthy McNasty’s (later renamed the
Palomino) in Hollywood and producer Richard Perry who has numerous gold and
platinum records to his credit and who also produced Fanny happened to be there
that night.
Darling relates what happened next, “I sang a couple of
songs and Richard Perry called me and he said you need to be in the band. You
need to be the lead singer in the band. I said okay, great.
I was a silly kid and I thought that
sounds good. He made me feel like I was so good. He wanted me to be the face of
the band. That made me feel like I had value and the more I feel valued the
better I am. That’s how I work.”
June (Millington) from Fanny just put out a book and it
is a great book. It is called Land of a
Thousand Bridges, which I loved reading, because I got to read (about Fanny)
from her perspective. As I was reading it I was reading our history and I knew
how I felt at the time and I had no idea what she was thinking at the time. It
was really eye opening. She talks a lot about how difficult it was for women (in
music). I didn’t feel that way and I don’t know if it was because I was naïve or
I was oblivious, but I was having a great freaking time. I was the drummer in a
band and I got to sing my ass off. We were playing and we didn’t get turned
down. If somebody frowned upon us,
I didn’t know it, because I felt good about what I was doing. Joni Mitchell was
there, Bonnie Raitt was there and Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth were there (part
of the music scene).
There
was a difference between the girl front singer and the girl who actually picked
up an axe (guitar) and played as well. There weren’t a lot of girls that even
thought about doing that and the only reason that I did it (played
an instrument) was a total accident.
I had two brothers, an older brother and a younger brother and my sister
wasn’t even born yet and my mother said what do you guys want to play? We were
in school so my brother played the trombone and I guess I was supposed to play
the piano and my younger brother Henry played the drums. (Sometimes) we would
switch around. My piano was broken, so nobody could really play that and I would
fool around on my brother’s drums. He was going to audition for a band and I
happened to be sitting on the drum set when the people came over to hear him,
but they wanted me. Here is the amazing thing about my family, my younger
brother gave me his drum set willingly and when things would break my brothers
would fix them for me. There was never any resentment or jealousy. My sister,
she is a drummer now too and she is nine years younger than me. My parents were
awesome and they would clear the furniture out of the living room and they would
start flipping burgers. We would have rehearsals in the living room. It was a
pretty supportive family.”
Darling reflects upon her time with Fanny, while in Los
Angeles, “We had this great house in Hollywood Hills called Fanny Hill and it
used to be Hedy Lamarr’s old house at the top of Marmont Lane, above the Chateau
Marmont Hotel. It was an amazing old Spanish (type) mansion.
There were three floors, a basement, the middle floor and the top floor.
We lived there and we rehearsed there. Little Feat used to come and jam in the
basement. The Band showed up, Joe Cocker showed up and Bonnie Raitt would show
up. There were people rehearsing on every level of the house. It was a fantastic
place to be, while I was living there with the band (Fanny).
There was a woman named Linda Wolf who started
documenting things and taking pictures, hundreds and hundreds of pictures. She
(later became) the official photographer for the Olympics (1984 Los Angeles) and
she moved on to become quite a successful photographer. When June came out with
her book Land of a Thousand Bridges,
Linda sent me an email and she said, I don’t know if you ever knew this Brie,
but if you ever felt like you weren’t wanted in that band or you weren’t good
enough it is only because Roy Silver the manager and Richard Perry the producer
were dead set on having the female Beatles and the female Beatles were a four
piece band. They couldn’t have just a lead singer. Richard liked me, but when
push came to shove, they liked their female Beatles idea better. At the time it
was crushing for me, because nobody ever likes being let go from anything. It
was so much fun and these were my friends. I moved past that and I joined other
bands and I did other things. I had a great time. That was in the seventies.
Then I ended up playing with Fanny again when we went out on tour and we
did the record Rock and Roll Survivors.”
In the 1980s Brie Howard Darling formed a songwriting
trio with Glen Ballard and Davey Faragher and they wrote an estimated sixty or
seventy songs for MCA Records, including
the song “Night Line,” which was pulled from Michael
Jackson’s album Thriller at the last
minute when the two record labels could not come to an agreement over a split on
the publishing rights.
Darling recalls the feeling when they got the news, “I
have to tell you that it was much more than heartbreaking. At the time we didn’t
know how big it was going to be, because
Off the Wall (Michael Jackson’s previous album) had sold something like four
million records. Rick Shoemaker called me from MCA and he said are you sitting
down? I said okay I will sit down. He said they are pulling it off of the record
and I thought oh man, there goes my new car and little did I know it was going
to sell, twenty-eight, twenty-nine or thirty million copies.
The version with Michael still exists. I’ve heard it on
YouTube and it will probably come out one of these days. It is in the vault and
it will probably come out on one of the compilation records, so I will make some
money, which is nice. I really had to come to terms with that and it was a hard
thing to take for a while, especially when
Thriller started selling and I
thought, I could have been a multi-multi-millionaire. It was tough to take, but
the way I look at it now is if they do put it out and I get something from it
that would be great, but what I’ve learned is it is not real until you have
cashed the check.
That’s just the way it is. Something might happen and
nothing might happen and I am okay with that. A lot might happen and I would
love that. What I realize is if I want to make something work and make something
happen, I have to make it happen. I can’t wait for somebody to die or to decide
if they want to use it, it is up to me to make something happen. Most of my life
since I started playing, I have been a team player. I am a band guy. I love
working with other people, but I guess what I am finding out is if I really want
to be in control of what is left of my destiny I need to take the bull by the
horns and to find that courage within to do it on my own rather than depending
on somebody else. I do have a tendency to know what works best and I think you
can only pull that off when it is your own thing.
In recent years Darling performed as a percussionist and
singer with her husband Dave Darling in the band he founded Boxing Gandhis.
Just before this interview was published the Food Network announced that on Monday March 29th (2016) it will air an episode on the program Cake Wars, featuring Brie Howard Darling and her granddaughter Storm. Check your local listings for the time.
Duet of Brie Howard Darling singing with Carole King.