This designer's creations take the cake

Elisa Strauss opens the door of her offices wearing a white apron stained with black dye.

The pony-tailed baker has spent nearly a week trying to make a Manolo Blahnik stiletto out of sugar dough to complement a white shoe box made of vanilla cake with chocolate butter-cream frosting. Delicate, shimmery pink tissue paper, constructed of sugar, completes the cake.

Returning to work in her small, steamy kitchen, Ms. Strauss focuses as intensely as a professional tennis player watching the seam of an incomingtennis ball. Gingerly she places what appears to be a leatherlike shoe upper onto a pink sole, on which there are delicate stitches and a black Manolo Blahnik label.

Strauss then "glues" the two pieces together with royal icing. Later, she'll paint the icing black with a small paintbrush and food color - the reason for Strauss's stained apron and slightly blackened fingernails.

The former artist and designer opened her business, Confetti Cakes, three years ago. She specializes in whimsical, elaborate, and offbeat designs - from the Eiffel Tower and the Baseball Hall of Fame to glowworms and copies of the sheep in the Serta mattress commercial.

"Everything I do, anything I see, I think of as a cake. You really can replicate anything," Strauss says.

It turns out the savvy baker has chosen a good business for herself. In 2002, custom-decorated cakes and wedding cakes constituted 22 percent of the output at US retail bakeries, according to a survey by Modern Baking magazine.

Constructing these elaborate designs takes countless hours. The cost of custom cakes (up to thousands of dollars) can also be prohibitive. But for bakers with an artistic inclination, creating a pièce de résistance can be very gratifying.

The unusual cakes are often the highlights of celebrations. Those fortunate enough to receive a Strauss creation, which sell for $400 and up, are not always eager to cut into them.

For a surprise party recently, she designed a cake in the shape of the guest of honor's sailboat. In the middle of the night, Strauss says she received a phone call from the wife asking if she could shellac the cake and save it.

"No, it's a cake," she recalls telling her. "It's made of sugar."

"Everyone was so mad at me," says customer Jamie Chew, recalling her guests' reactions when she sliced into a cake that had decorations that included a cellphone, a red patent leather Louis Vuitton handbag, a polka-dot scarf, and a dress shoe.

Scarves and high heels? It wasn't hard for Strauss, who started out in the fashion industry, to transition into a career in baking. After about four years designing textiles for Ralph Lauren and handbags and hair accessories for Frederic Fekkai, Strauss decided she wanted more meaningful work. "Do women of Madison Avenue need another handbag?" she recalls asking herself.

So Strauss applied to Peter Kump's cooking school (now the Institute of Culinary Education). "Cake girl," as her friends call her now, had grown up baking sugar cookies with her grandmother.

Strauss studied art at Vassar College and the Art Institute of Chicago, but she always kept a hand in the kitchen, baking cakes for friends' birthdays. "I knew I could do the art part, but I went to pastry school so they'd taste good, too."

Page: 1 | 2