Austin baker Hannah Brockert made the rapper’s realistic-looking spaghetti and meatball cake out of devil’s food cake

A cake in the shape of a pile of spaghetti with red sauce and meatballs.

Rapper Eminem celebrated his birthday this week before his Saturday concert at the international racing competition Formula One (F1) at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas (CoTA). And naturally, he was honored with a realistic-looking cake of spaghetti and meatballs from Austin baker Hannah Brockert.

Live-fire cooking event company All Pro Smoke House (which runs a whole food section at F1) was tasked with throwing a birthday party for Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers). All Pro chef Andy Knudson is friends with Brockert, who works as a private cake baker, and asked if she could make the cake. She agreed.

Brockert’s cake parameters were that the dessert had to be “eye-catching,” as she writes over email, and be completed in 48 hours. She was thinking about the design when she realized that a lyric from the iconic song “Lose Yourself” could work perfectly: “His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy / There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti.” It’s a line that everyone knows and she wondered, “What if [the cake] was just a ‘comically large mound of spaghetti?’ And that’s it,” she writes. “It really made me giggle.

Brockert and her husband, baker Conor Smith, researched Eminem’s preferred flavors. They found that his rider (typically a list of requested items for a performer’s dressing room before a show) included peanut butter. Using that as her base, she fashioned a devil’s food cake layered with salty peanut butter buttercream, topped with strawberry sauce (marinara), shaved white chocolate (Parmesan), and chocolate rice crispy balls (meatballs).

Eminem posed with the cake in a post shared by the Instagram account for his Detroit restaurant Mom’s Spaghetti (which is also apparently serving food at F1). His birthday was on October 17.

Brockert was thrilled to be able to bake a cake for Eminem. “I’m a millennial who grew up listening and watching his music change the game,” she writes. “Now getting asked to make this cake for someone whose ‘legendary’ status is actually so hard to wrap my head around.” She hopes that more people will request her spaghetti and meatball cakes now too.

Celebrities celebrating birthdays in Austin often tag local bakeries and bakers to make their celebratory cakes. This includes rock band Sleater-Kinney from the now-closed Paper Route bakery and Kanye’s cake from Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop.