By Adrienne Martini
On days when my actual job is bringing me down, I fantasize about a career change. It's always the same fantasy: I will hang out my shingle as a baker and make fabulous cakes for hungry customers.
I am not alone in having this particular dream. Several area women have done just that.
New Berlin's Kelly Banks started her own cake decorating business in 2005. Banks, who trained at the Culinary Institute of America, decided that she didn't want to spend all of her time working for someone else after she had her daughter. With that decision, Kelly Banks Cakes was born.
"The main reason I got into baking in the first place was because I don't eat red meat," Banks said. "I don't even like to look at steak, let alone cook it. So I got into baking."
Banks' business has grown every year, even in these challenging economic times.
"It started off just being something fun, extra income. Every once in a while someone would ask me to do something for them," she said. "Now I just have cakes every single weekend. It's definitely more of a business now that it was even last year."
Banks takes pride in making everything from scratch and encourages home bakers to do the same.
Once you load up on fresh butter and refined sugar, however, you need to have some basic skills in order to make your cake and frosting. Fortunately, Clinton Plaza's Party Perfect offers Wilton cake classes nearly every week.
These classes used to be offered at Bresee's but hadn't been in Oneonta for more than a decade. Cathy Wise, Party Perfect's owner, knew she wanted to offer them from the minute she opened her store. Two years ago, "it all just fell into place," Wise said. "It's just a fun thing to learn and it's a great skill to have."
Wise doesn't teach the classes herself. While she has completed the course, she doesn't regularly decorate cakes.
"I don't have time for it," Wise said, laughing. "I do it for family."
Winnie Talbot not only teaches the Wilton classes at Party Perfect, she also decorates ice cream and wedding cakes through Razzles on Southside Drive.
Talbot didn't intend to become a Wilton teacher.
"I took a bunch of Wilton classes and then I took other cake classes because I wanted to know how to do cakes for our business. Then Wilton started calling me asking me if I'd teach class. I kept telling them `no.' I didn't have time. Finally I said, `you know what? If you wait until late fall, then I will start,'" Talbot said.
She suggests that wannabee cake divas, "Take course one from Wilton. It's basic cake decorating and basic cake baking. Anybody who takes course one will learn a lot about baking a cake, filling it, basic decorating and basic icing. That's what I feel homemakers should have if they want to bake their little one a birthday cake. Everything else beyond that is pretty specialized."
While most of her decorating work is relatively straightforward, some requests can get a little spicy.
"I did some bachelorette cakes this summer that ... you know, I wouldn't take a picture of them and put them in my cake book," Talbot said.
Cooperstown-based cake decorator Marjorie Landers has had a few odd requests as well.
"The most unusual cakes I do are groom's cakes, which can be in any shape or form," Landers said. "One groom's cake I did that was a for a groom who was a serpentologist. So that cake was in the shape of a snake."
But these challenges are part of what has kept her engaged in her work for the last 15 years. "I do enjoy doing new things. It's fun for the artistic part of me. If you do the same thing over and over again, it gets to be no fun," Landers said.
Landers, who was a nurse before going into cakes full time, started decorating as a sideline for the bed-and-breakfast, the White House Inn, she and her husband run.
"I'd always made cakes for family," Landers said, when asked how she grew her business. "Then I made some wedding cakes for friends and delivered them to places like the Otesaga and the Otesaga started to recommend me. Now, caterers have gotten to know me, as well. I think word of mouth is probably the best recommendation you can get."
The Wilton course was part of Landers' training as well.
"I did once take, about 25 years ago, take a Wilton cake decorating course. But I'd been decorating cakes on my own for a long time before that. My mother taught me a lot. She decorated cakes, as well. I believe every time you take a little class on something, you come away with at least one new thing," she said.
"I am artistically inclined, so I think the cake decorating, the artistic part of it, appealed to me. It came easily to me. Then I found some good recipes and I started to create my own thing. But I believe, of course, that anybody can do it. The more you do it, the better you get," Landers concluded.
While I'm not quite ready to chuck my writing and teaching careers and invest myself in a study of baked goods quite yet, these four women have given me more food for my day-dreams.
