The Quest for the Perfect Cake

By theadmin

The art that goes into a mouthful of cake — the texture of the bite, the significance of context and occasion — is complex. For three Texas cake-makers, laboring for the perfect crumb is sweet … and sometimes scary.

Frosted Art Bakery & Studio, Dallas

Frosted Art Bakery & Studio has been making wedding cakes for Dallas belle dame Neiman Marcus for 70 years. This, in practical terms, might mean 10-tiered confections as tall as a grand staircase, with edible pearls and replicas of bronze vases, or 6-foot-tall cascades of buttercream roses.

Frosted Art’s executive party chef and general manager, Bronwen Weber, was born in Calgary, Alberta, and worked in her first bakery at age 14. At 21, she began learning the finer arts of decorating, while working for several notable Texas bakeries. This was her introduction to a world that has meant it’s her business to know blush pink moiré, matte ivory, and satin — a world where a business meeting might involve decisions about crème brûlée versus raspberry petit-four filling, made by soon-to-be-weds eating cake.

Weber has seen the evolution of wedding cakes trend from mere mirrors of the wedding’s colors — peach or pink? — to more intimate projections of the bride’s taste. There were the mid-’90s, when things “got a little ruffly and fluffy” and basket weave was unavoidable. (Those were the worst cake years, she says.)

But her skills in painting, floral work, and piping — skills that have earned recognition on the Food Network and elsewhere — are best displayed in Lambeth-style piping, a Victoriana of finery: tiers of elegant whorls, curlicues, and rosettes, each more elaborate than the last.

The brides for whom she now makes cakes are sometimes third-generation with Neiman Marcus, borrowing elements from their grandmother’s or mother’s cakes, a photo of which often stands alongside. “It’s not common, but when it happens, it’s an event,” Weber says.

Sometimes the cakes reflect the finery of a Dallas historical place: the Adolphus Hotel or the Belo Mansion. “When you put it next to old glamour …,” she says, and the image says everything.

Weber has kept shelves of Neiman Marcus’ archive books, reaching back to the years of the famed decorator Arturo Diaz, her predecessor and a man so notable in his field he signed his cakes on the top tier, Weber recalls, in a flourish that was sometimes forged in other states.

Her team, collectively, boasts 150–160 years of experience and an appreciation for longevity. For instance, the classic Neiman Marcus yule log cake they make every year: “I would never dare touch it,” Weber says. Some have been ordering the staple for half a century. “We would never dare mess with the classics.”

Sideserf Cake Studio, Austin

The cakes that come out of Sideserf Cake Studio look like the work of a preternaturally gifted fine arts student who dropped the canvas and took to modeling edible materials. Which, in fact, they are.

Natalie Sideserf has seen her cakes jump to the top of social media feeds. She’s become known for hyper-realistic bust cakes that reflect her background in art school in Cleveland, Ohio. “Why don’t you try making cake?” a friend had asked her one day. And that is exactly what she did. Since then, she has been treating the perishable stuff of confectionery like she would any art medium.

Now her palette is the newest-generation gel food coloring, watercolor effects, or the powdered pigments, meticulously hand-painted, that allow her to create color gradients and complex chiaroscuro effects. Her aptly named cake studio gathers the custom-art aspects of a tattoo parlor, the dazzling technical ingenuity of special-effects makeup, and the roll-up-your-sleeves mess and tastiness of a bakery all in one.

“I use a lot of my college education on my cakes,” she says, laughing. Which results, most often, in people happily cutting into realistically modeled heads of staggering anatomical correctness.

Natalie’s husband, Dave, is the baker to her decorator. They work together on projects that can sometimes take more than a week from first prep to completion. Each project runs up against the challenge of a short window of time, but each cake is also a problem to solve and a chance to innovate — recently, Natalie came up with a technique for making lifelike gelatin eyeballs.

Sideserf’s hyperrealist designs have gone viral and become known internationally, with a particular following in the UK and Australia. They’ve been complimented by Elijah Wood. The Sideserfs have been recognized for a cake onstage for Ray Benson and then hung out backstage to watch him play with Willie Nelson and The Avett Brothers. They’ve fashioned a Minnesota Iceman cake for Austin’s Museum of the Weird, and a Twix-flavored cake depicting a sloth sitting on the moon, holding a ping-pong paddle, for a comedian ping-pong slap down.

Ultimately, they want to stay accessible to anyone with a theme and a budget. They had their pick of cities to settle in. “We considered New York and LA, but it’s the creative sensibility of Austin that brought us here,” says Dave.

Their best calling card may be the creation they devised for their own wedding. Searching for horror-movie references to complement their Halloween-season wedding at the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater — Dave is a film buff — they landed on the idea of presenting their guests with their own severed heads. “Till death do us part,” rendered literally. Exactly what you’d expect from a duo that stakes its pride on realism.

Natalie and Dave Sideserf’s cakes look like the work of a preternaturally gifted art student. Which, in fact, they are. Photo courtesy of Sideserf Cake Studio.

Cake Art, San Antonio

On the agenda: a sushi board, a three-tiered carousel, and a family of piglets blowing out a birthday candle atop a field of buttercream grass and ombré roses.

Monique Herrera’s little shop on the northernmost outskirts of San Antonio, where she attended culinary school, is busy today — but it started on a prayer seven years ago, when she was twentysomething-years-old with a dream and a store to create.

Herrera had worked in other bakeries in town. As a San Antonio native, she’d learned the city’s styles and tastes. Although she’s also worked in bakeries in Washington, D.C., where her husband was stationed for military service, her small business is imbued with a particularly San Antonian sense of place.

“We’re Southern, so [you’ll see] things like the traditional almond, vanilla, red velvet, German chocolate,” Herrera says. But you’ll also find cajeta buttercream and a churro-flavored cake. “That keeps us South Texas.”
Much of Cake Art’s business comes from events celebrating military retirements and promotions from nearby bases. “We do lots of outdoor Texas weddings,” Herrera says.

Their location is poised on the edge of the Texas Hill Country and its ranches. Her bakery’s open floor plan allows a view all the way to the back, to the team of six bakers and decorators. Now, her concerns are those of a successful small-business owner: paying your bills; making sure your employees get paid. She’s the mistress of her hard-won, humble world.

“We’ve finally been here long enough to [make a wedding cake, but also] see the [baby] shower cake, the first and second birthday,” she says. “Everybody [who] works here takes part in every cake. [And] everybody who comes in here, we wanna know their story.”

There have been sacrifices. “I don’t get to be home enough,” she says. “But the reward is I love what I do. At the end of the day, I’d rather be here than anywhere else.”

Meanwhile, her shop is an inspiration for anyone who wonders whether they have the determination and grit to pipe hundreds of thousands of roses, and to set out on their own.

Monique Herrera’s Cake Art in San Antonio started on a prayer and a dream. Now she has a team of six behind her, and 40 cakes to decorate every week. Photo by Josh Huskin.

For more Texans creating treasures, meet Tex Robin.