Cake, Please! • Cedar Park
Cake, Please! • Cedar Park
By Mark Collins Friday, 17 October 2008
Ordering a custom-designed cake from Cake, Please! is like ordering an edible piece of art. So much so, in fact, that you won’t want to eat it until you take the first bite and realize how delicious it is — then the rest of the cake will likely disappear rather quickly.
“Other places may use cardboard and glue to design their cakes, but we strive to make the entire cake edible,” said Cake, Please! co-owner Jaime Chapman. “[Some of the decorations on the cake] might not taste great, but you can eat it.”
Chapman and Keesha Waits are co-owners and head decorators for Cake, Please!, a cake decorating business that operates under the mantra of “if you can dream it, we can create it.”
That challenge has led them to bake cake creations like a shark that played the “Jaws” theme and an airplane complete with wings and a tail.
“I’m an artist who designs cakes — cake is my medium,” Waits said. “Sometimes I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but we think about it and figure it out.”
Cake, Please! can accomodate customers who request organic, gluten free and vegan recipes.
Waits and Chapman founded Cake, Please! in November 2007 after Chapman completed a cake-decorating course and suggested the friends start a cake decorating business “as a whim.”
Waits, who graduated from the Texas Culinary Academy in Austin and was baking and designing cookies and cakes for her friends, took Chapman up on the business offer.
With no previous small-business experience, the duo made a list of necessary tasks and got to work.
“We had no idea what we were doing — we’re still figuring it out,” Chapman said. “These have been such a fun nine months in my life.”
The decorators rent a commercial kitchen for baking and decorating and run the business out of their homes. Cake, Please! can prepare a cake or cupcakes for any occasion in any flavor with any frosting combination and is expanding the business into the wedding field by partnering with the David’s Bridal in the Arboretum. Free delivery is included to anyone in the Austin area.
The business owners’ five-year plan calls for a storefront and somebody to help with the baking, but Waits and Chapman are taking their time growing their business because they are trying to start Cake, Please! without going into debt. Each dollar they make goes back into the business.
“We have big dreams, but limited resources,” Waits said. “It has to grow slow. This has to be a grassroots growing business.”
Sweet partnership
Cake, Please! recently became an authorized select baker with Wedding Cakes Across America and David’s Bridal. The cake-creating duo specializes in wedding cakes and will meet with the bride and up to three of her friends for a complimentary consultation, which involves design development of the cake and samples of three cake flavors and three different icings.
Cake, Please!, 203-9111, www.theoriginalcakeplease.com
