Valentine's Day is a day for couples that positively glows with love, romance and seduction. Now everyone can share in the love affair with our passion for whimsical designer cakes.
These aren't the skimpy dietary offerings that have popped up in recent years. These are the confections we dream about, the ones we've drooled over in window displays, the ones loaded with fresh eggs, butter and sugar. Hands up — how many of you have fantasized about munching on these miraculous and luscious concoctions?
There are bakeries galore in the phone book that produce assembly line products. However, two St. Albert pastry artists are trying to crack the market and have gone one step further. Jen Gray, of Over The Top Cakes, and Michelle Andrade, of Bogato Custom Cake Designs create one-of-a-kind, show-stopping edible architecture that immediately grabs the spotlight.
Just a quick scamper across their websites reveals their jaw-dropping talent. At www.overthetopcakes.ca, Gray displays a topsy-turvy Dr. Seuss Cat in the Hat, a SpongeBob Christmas scene and a whimsical red dragon. Equally breathtaking at www.bogato.ca are Andrade's sweet treats – an off-kilter four layer wedding cake, a butterfly emerging from a cocoon and an edible bucket filled with sparkling sugar-made wine bottles.
Ironically, neither Gray nor Andrade are accredited professional pastry chefs. However, that hasn't stopped a love of creating three-dimensional edible art from flowering into part-time businesses that ultimately helps their clients celebrate important occasions in their lives.
The Calgary-raised Gray, now the events co-ordinator at North Pointe Church, actually decorated her first sheet cake in Grade 6. In Grade 9 she was raising money for a field-trip to Vancouver. “I baked two character cakes — an Ernie and Bert cake and a 3D panda bear and put it in the teachers' staff room with business cards. The cakes were about $12 and I raised about $400, enough to pay for the trip.”
By the time Gray was 15, she challenged herself by entering a decorated cookie contest for the Festival of Trees, fashioning a three-dimensional scene with Santa coming down a chimney. “I beat the professionals.”
Although she bested the professionals, trying to run a cake business was difficult. “I was young and people didn't think I could do cakes. People didn't take me seriously so I slowed down with it.”
After high school, she slowly climbed the ranks at Chevron, becoming a geological technician and learned snowboarding on the side. After the company's 1992 layoffs, she moved to St. Albert and became the first certified snowboard instructor at Rabbit Hill.
Gray rediscovered her natural talents when her eight-year-old son Jonaven and his best friend Timothy asked her to make special birthday cakes. “They both have birthdays in March and they had a combined birthday.”
Jonaven wanted a SpongeBob pineapple house complete with a hamburger car and Timothy wanted Gary the snail, SpongeBob's pet. “I was watching Ace of Cakes and Cake Boss and it was getting to be popular, and thought ‘I can do that.'”
She purchased fondant, a rolling pin and sculpting tools. “The boys went crazy. They didn't want anybody to touch them. I was surprised they let us cut it.”
Right at the time Gray was making a cake for her son, Andrade was also feeling inspired by the Food Network. She had graduated from Ă©cole J.H. Picard and enrolled at NAIT's dental assistant program. Although she'd fiddled in the kitchen as a teenager, played with clay and sketched, the artistic bug never really hit her until the Ace of Cakes and Cake Boss debuted. “When I saw the creativity and fun that came with it, I thought it was something I would like to do,” Andrade says.
Determined to be the best, Andrade took vacation time from her job as a dental technician working with cancer patients at the Misericordia Hospital to enrol at the Bonnie Gordon College of Confectionary Arts in Toronto. She returned armed with exciting recipes, a fresh skill set and newfound confidence.
At the base of Andrade's drive is the role food plays in our lives. “Food is an important component of our lives and what we share. When people come together for an evening and they share food it's a wonderful experience.”
“I've seen enough people who can't partake in eating food and it's very sad. We take food for granted. We take for granted our ability to eat and chew and for many people I've seen that's taken away. Food means life. Food means joy. Food means family. Food means friends.
“It also means love. When we create, whether it's food or cake, you share a part of yourself. When I create a cake, it's like a gift I present and then others get to eat it.”
Like Gray, Andrade thrives on pushing her artistic boundaries. She volunteered to create a delicacy for the 2010 Cake Walk, a fundraiser for the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts. “We each had a diva to create a cake for. Mine was Julie Andrews. I made a guitar standing up with a Julie Andrews sculpted figure on top of the guitar.”
It took her about 35 hours to fashion it and she won silver.
Some of Andrade's more interesting designs have been a golf course shaped like Ireland, a fairytale castle, a red wagon and a Mr. Potato Head. For her father, an ice cream aficionado, she baked and decorated a Häagen Daz bucket full of ice cream. She shaped a figurine to resemble her dad holding a couple of spoons and put him in a life preserver in the middle of the bucket. “It's him in an ocean of ice cream.”
Gray too has been making a name for herself. Out of the blue, the Food Network contacted her and asked Gray to send in an audition tape for a potential cake challenge. “Even if I don't get on, the fact that they asked me really upped my confidence level,” Gray says.
And in the 2010 Festival of Cakes, she entered a SpongeBob Christmas and a Hogwarts castle complete with working lights in the professional cake category. She won gold for SpongeBob and a bronze for Hogwarts. “I'm not normally competitive, but I push myself for something like this.”
Most of her clients look for razzle-dazzle and individuality, and popular culture plays a huge role. “Purse cakes are huge right now. People like the idea of a cake that doesn't look like a cake, that it looks like something else.”
One husband ordered a birthday cake for his wife in the shape of her favourite Coach purse and Kate Spade shoes. Gray complied right down to the designer label in the shoe's inner sole.
Another friend asked for a Lady Gaga cake and Gray's funky result combined a silver mask, a red carpet, black zebra stripes, feathers and a fondant singer.
“These are all personal and tell a story. You might not get it, but the person who gets the cake knows. It's all about the little details that make it personal for them.”
Beautiful to look at, delicious to eat, these personalized dream cakes are a splurge. Starting at $200 to $250, the price rises according to the ingredients used and complexity of design.
But as both Gray and Andrade have stated, “If we can visualize it, we can make it.”
