Decorated Cakes Got me Started in the Catering Business

I was passionate about icing in beautiful shapes and colors

My signature cake came to be a simply decorated cake with diagonal lines using various colors, the message put into an unlined rectangle and a glittery paper bow off to the side. This allowed for many variations in color palette and message, and looked creative and tasteful.

It was the seventies and many women were learning the art of cake decorating

The first time I saw a fancy cake, a friend made one for my birthday. It had a lid that was solid flowers, like a garden on a cake. I wish I had a picture of that one. Before long I’d convinced my friend to teach me to decorate cakes.

I bought the supplies she recommended, and a Wilton Cake Decorating book. She gave me a few lessons in icing the cake and making a flat surface for the decorating, and how to make some basic things using the various icing tips. I created a baby shower cake, some cakes for my daughter and family with simple designs.

I wanted to learn to make different kinds of flowers so I read about that and began experimenting with making flowers on cakes, and also making bigger flowers on a little metal pin on tiny squares of waxed paper that could be taken off and set aside to dry. I loved roses, learned to make them and dry them for flower arrangements. It was a lot of fun.

Then people began asking me to make special cakes for their kids’ birthdays: dolls and ballerinas. R2D2, spaceships, farms, favorite pets, or cars. All kinds of things.

And adults wanted strange things put onto cakes, too: Lucy the Elephant, dozens of unique flags for the International Club, special meaningful phrases.

I didn’t complain at the time because I was selling them and getting referrals for more. Every cake was a new challenge. And, along the way, I got better at creating my own designs. One of my cakes, a picture of a sailing ship commemorating the 75th anniversary of the town of Port Republic, New Jersey even made it into the newspaper. I drew the design with a toothpick onto the cake and filled it in. (I looked down upon those fancy machines that were becoming popular for decorators to make it easy to project a design onto the cake. Snob)

My own style emerged

After a few years, I began to develop a style of decorating that pleased me. I grew tired of copying pictures of odd things onto cakes. I liked simpler designs, flowers or abstract shapes. I was fascinated with ”cornelli lace”, a fill-in rambling line that reminds you of those maze puzzles where you try to draw a line from starting to the ending point. The lacy effect provided a lovely background for flowers, see below.

My signature cake came to be a simply decorated cake with diagonal lines using various colors, the message put into an unlined rectangle and a glittery paper bow off to the side. This allowed for many variations in color palette and message. It looked creative and tasteful.

As I began to think about going into cooking for a living in a bigger way, I began to feel a bit embarrassed by my cakes. My teacher friend had said to use Duncan Hines golden butter cake mixes and I always did. They always worked. The icing we used was made with hydrogenated vegetable shortening and, of course, lots of sugar. These cake mixes and the horrid icing were not me, I was ignoring my principles. This had to stop.

Being a butter lover myself, I tried to substitute butter but it wouldn’t get as firm, melted too easily. The best I could do was mix half butter, half shortening. But any flowers had to be made from the all shortening recipe or else Royal Icing.

I began to veer away from ”fancy” cakes and tried to figure out how to make my homemade cakes and butter frosting work for weddings.

I ended up making quite a few wedding cakes for catered events. They added an extra dimension of stress to the affair. I not only had to get them baked, iced, constructed and decorated, but then get them to the reception intact, reassemble them and serve them.

Often with fountains, ornaments, side cakes, cupcakes, flowers, greens, etc to deal with. It would have been different if I had a cake decorator on staff, but I was it. For a while I couldn’t pass up the money so I tried to figure out how to do it all.

How do you stop doing something when customers are depending on you to keep doing it?

Eventually I found myself too busy and began turning away customers or arranging for someone else to make the cake and take full responsibility for it. I stopped making cakes commercially altogether.

The only way to get out of making so many cakes was to stop taking money for them. When someone special asked, I would either say no, or do it for free. This worked well to end a lot of the requests.

I had so many family and friends accustomed to having me make their party cakes, that it was hard to say no. Instead, I taught a lot of friends what I had learned, sent customers to them, encouraged them to do it themselves. I was eventually able to stop taking orders for cakes and concentrate on other parts of my business.

Takeaway: more life lessons

• While I’d do a lot of complicated things for money- in the cake decorating area, I mean - simple designs are often prettier and more versatile.
• The pastry bag was a fantastic tool. I never needed to use a cookie press ( the $£¥•+%#$ contraption that never worked) again. I learned my way around a pastry bag, got pretty good at writing with it and this skill had been very useful. I also learned to make very nice roses.
• I made cakes for many people who later asked me to cater for them.
• I learned that sugar made me angry. When I ate icing, I got very mean. That had to stop.

Our wedding cake

My wedding cake was the first decorated cake that I saw up close. We had ordered it from a bakery and it wasn’t very special but it was ours. I don’t remember how it tasted at our wedding but we saved the top layer in the freezer for our first anniversary and it was pretty disgusting then.

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