Baker Extraordinaire Lily Vanilli

She’s baked cakes for Elton John’s White Tie and Tiara Ball, sells her wares at Harrods and has been described by Dazed and Confused as ‘a rock’n’roll baker’. I think it’s safe to say that Lily Vanilli, London’s most imaginative ‘queen of cakes’ is flying high right now.

Never one to sit still for long, Lily’s latest venture, 180 Club, combines her creative approach to baking with London’s increasingly popular underground food movement. Bored with chain restaurants and Starbucks on every corner, an increasing number of supper clubs and members nights have sprung up over the past few years, offering the capital’s foodies something a bit more exclusive and original. 180 is a twist on this trend – a pop-up, member’s-only cake club.

I headed down to Stoke Newington’s fabulously bonkers show home House of Hackney, which played host to the opening of Lily’s latest venture, to see what makes Ms Vanilli tick.

The first thing I notice is that it’s rammed. Lily herself is behind the counter, serving up glittery scones, amazing chocolate brownies and absinthe ice cream – which is possibly my new favourite thing. I decide that I need to try pretty much everything, for the sake of research, you know. When Lily finally catches a breather, I want to know what it is that brought her into this business in the first place.

‘I’m a baker’ she shrugs, ‘I started selling cakes a couple of years ago, under the name Lily Vanilli, and it’s just diversified from there really. Recently we started doing events and now I supply cakes to Harrods’. She makes it sound easy, but the food business, particularly when it comes to a recent craze like cupcakes, is a notoriously difficult place to get noticed. With hundreds of established companies, from Hummingbird to Magnolia crowding the marketplace, how does a small business make a name for itself?

What makes Lily stand out is the experience she creates around her food. With 180, she’s managed to launch a successful underground event which not only provides the perfect backdrop for her to explore some of her wilder recipes, but also goes beyond ‘tea and cake’, throwing cocktails and madcap entertainment into the mix.

‘We call it a private members cake club,’ Lily explains. ‘Essentially, it’s about pairing cake and ice cream with cocktails and then we incorporate other elements of theatre into it. So we did a launch party here at House of Hackney – we had a live fortune cookie teller, and my friend Marawa the Amazing climbed a ladder of swords and made a fruit salad at the same time’.

When she isn’t hard at work creating culinary delights such as mini apple champagne donuts and chocolate dipped pistachio meringues, I want to know where she goes to enjoy a good meal.  A girl after my own heart, Lily is a bona fide East Londoner, recommending Commerical Street gem St Johns Bread and Wine as well as Spanish hotspot Viajante.

To end our chat, I’m keen to know what Lily has planned for the future. To me, the idea of a secret club, always moving and only around for a few days in any one place seems to fit perfectly with the Lily Vanilli creative brand. Can she ever see herself settling down and setting up a permanent shop somewhere? ‘It’s not really my ambition to have a shop,’ answers Lily.  ‘My ambition is to keep changing’.

www.lilyvanilli.com