Haute cakes
HALF MOON BAY BAKER'S CREATIONS PUT ICING ON WEDDINGS, CELEBRATIONS
By Aleta Watson
Mercury News
Wednesday, July 27, 2005When Susan Morgan thinks cake, she sees handbags, baby bassinets, Limoges boxes, picnic baskets and towering stacks of gaily wrapped presents. If her clients can imagine it, she very likely can make it.
What began with a homemade white chocolate and raspberry swirl cheesecake for her sister Charlotte's wedding in 1988 has turned into a high-profile business for the Half Moon Bay baker. Her colorful, sculptural cakes have been the centerpieces of many a pull-out-the-stops celebration, including a birthday bash for former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and a Washington, D.C., party in honor of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Elaborate tiered cakes from her Elegant Cheese Cakes kitchen in Princeton-by-the-Sea regularly travel as far as the East Coast for upscale nuptials. Smaller cakes have been featured in Neiman Marcus catalogs for a decade.
Morgan's cakes have been featured on television food shows and national publications. This spring the bakery was named one of Modern Bride magazine's top 25 trendsetters of 2005. A cake in the shape of a fully outfitted picnic basket with bread and wine was part of an exhibit last month at Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts, in Napa.
It's an impressive résumé for a baker who has no formal training and takes a decidedly unconventional approach to her craft. She melts chocolate in a microwave and rolls it into thin ``paper'' with a commercial pastry rolling machine before wrapping it around her cakes. She uses garlic presses and plastic cookie cutters to create decorations. Her recipes have evolved over the years from ideas she found in magazines and cookbooks.
``We find our own way of trial and error has really been the best,'' Morgan says. ``I haven't been to culinary school, but if you have an eye for color and design, that's what you need.''
Morgan was selling paper products for Kimberly-Clark when she made that first wedding cake. Even a few years after that, baking remained just a hobby. But she was taking photos of her cakes and showing them around. Soon she had enough customers that she was baking out of a caterer's kitchen in Foster City.
Within four years, she was wrapping her cheesecakes in thin sheets of chocolate that she cranked out of a pasta machine. Other bakers often use a cooked sugar and water confection known as fondant to give cakes a smooth finish, but Morgan likes the flavor and pliability of chocolate. For the intense colors that have become her trademark, she starts with a base of white chocolate and then tints it bright orange, lime green or pink with paste colors.
``About five years into it, we decided people liked the looks and designs, but they wanted a traditional cake,'' rather than a cheesecake, Morgan says. So she still makes cheesecakes, but about 80 percent of her business is now in substantial layer cakes in vibrant flavors such as pistachio and chocolate decadence.
``We're not light and fluffy,'' she says. ``I don't like light and airy genoise.''
Today, Morgan's cakes run from $65 for a little cheesecake wrapped in lilac-colored chocolate to $5,000 for fantasy wedding cakes that push the boundaries of pastry with bright colors, offbeat shapes and dizzying designs.
Each wedding cake is designed to reflect the bride's and groom's tastes and interests. There have been cakes shaped like stacks of presents or Limoges boxes or towers of bamboo and roses. They might be cloaked in mocha and several shades of pink or elegant ivory and chocolate diamonds. One memorable cake involved a Louis Vuitton suitcase, an engagement ring, a gym bag and a takeout carton of Chinese food, complete with chopsticks.
``She sketches every wedding cake out so the brides feel like they're getting a custom design, which, in fact, they are,'' says South Bay event planner Linda Noack, who often sends her clients to Morgan.
The cakes are expensive -- prices start at $11 per serving. But Noack notes that some of her clients are ``all about the wedding cake. If that's what their passion is, it's worth every penny.''
In the small commercial kitchen near Pillar Point Harbor, which has been cake central for Morgan and her handful of bakers for 10 years, the aroma of chocolate is intoxicating. Every cake is made from scratch using top-quality ingredients: Callebaut chocolate, Plugra butter and pure vanilla from Madagascar.
``We're still small potatoes,'' says Morgan, who turns out an average of five wedding cakes, a dozen or so smaller celebration cakes and 15-20 Neiman Marcus orders a week. ``We're not automated or anything. I don't really want to go that way.''
The cakes are baked and decorated in stages, frozen and shipped in special foam-lined boxes with instructions for thawing and assembling.
Many of the simpler designs are available for order on the Web year-round (www.elegantcheesecakes.com) for showers, birthdays, anniversaries and celebrations. But the most ambitious cakes are created from June through October, the peak of the wedding season.
``Nobody wants it to be exactly like what we did for someone else,'' Morgan says. ``They all want to be original.''
