Not just the icing on the cake

When Emily Blattel started The Cake Mom and Co. with her best friend, Jennifer Yarbro, in 2008, she thought hers would be more of a marketing position.

"I baked cakes, and I ate cakes, but I'd just buy sprinkles at Schnucks and stuff," she said, describing her typical culinary endeavors up to that point. "I just did it as a whim."

But soon after establishing The Cake Mom custom cake operation, circumstances drew Yarbro out of state, leaving Blattel to don the primary apron.

"As soon as she left, we started getting calls left and right," she said.

Despite a full-time job handling media relations for Saint Francis Medical Center, Blattel started crafting custom cakes.

Blattel scoops funfetti cake batter into cupcake tins. (Laura Simon)

With a background in art and graphic design, she found the gig engaging, not to mention delicious.

"It was things I was already interested in [but] then you get to eat it," she explains. Her medium of choice is buttercream. Her reason is simple.

"I love using buttercream because I love eating buttercream," she said.

Sugar Buzz Bakery's cake crafter, Nicole Huff, said that after years of baking cakes, it's not difficult to find new and more extravagant challenges. She's made children's birthday cakes, a 1950s antique Ford truck cake and even a sculpted cake made to look like a three-dimensional wolf's head smoking a cigar.

"[The client] was into wolves, but he liked cigars as well, so that's what we did," she said.

Blattel pipes buttercream frosting around the edges of a "smash cake." (Laura Simon)

Even if they're not as outlandish, most cakes that Huff makes require considerable work before the baking can even begin.

"When I did the antique truck, for example, I ordered the actual blueprints for the truck," she said. "I always thought in school, 'Oh this math, I'll never use this again,' but here I am using it a lot now."

Huff and Blattel say that while someone could learn the basics of baking and cake decorating fairly easily, tackling more audacious creations involves some trial and error.

"You're working with cake," Blattel said. "Sometimes it just doesn't want to work. It falls apart, and you have to take a break and come back to it."

Even the humidity or the lighting can affect a cake's outcome.

After meticulously carving her wolf's-head cake, Huff iced it white and colored it with an airbrush.

"And when I came back the next morning, it was green," she said. "The fluorescent lights had changed the color while it was drying."

She ended up repainting the cake and covering it with a garbage bag for the final transport to the reception hall, the most nerve-racking step of the process.

"You're always scared during transport that something's going to happen," she said. "If you're delivering a five-tier cake and someone pulls out in front of you, that cake gets crushed and you have to start over."

She and Blattel both have learned the prudence of making extras.

Emily Blattel spreads sprinkles across the top of a "smash cake." (Laura Simon)

"I have a repair kit that I always keep on hand," Blattel said. "That way, if anything should happen, I'm prepared."

Blattel said her favorite part of the process is the conceptualization of a cake. Many of her clients bring ideas culled from Pinterest to show what they want.

"Our favorite ones are the cakes where someone comes to us and says, 'OK. I've got this idea,'" she said. "Because a lot of times, when you get talking with them, you can come up with something more personal and interesting. That's what's fun as a designer."

Huff, on the other hand, is all about outdoing herself.

Emily Blattel scoops funfetti cake batter into cupcake tins. (Laura Simon)

"What I enjoy most is the biggest challenge," she said. "When people call me up and say, 'Can you do this?' I always say, 'Yes.' I'll figure it out and get it done, even if I have to stay up 24 hours. Especially if I've never done anything like that before."

"It's a special feeling," Blattel said. "At the end. When it's done and you say, 'There's nothing else I want to do to this.' There usually are some things that you might wish you'd done differently, but it's great to be able to tie a bunch of elements together like that."

tgraef@semissourian.com 388-3627