Custom decorations transform plain cakes into festive works of art

If your heart wants Cake Boss, but your wallet says grocery-store bakery, new products are coming out to help give cakes a high-end look for a low-end price.

The market is responding to America's obsession with all things cake. If you need proof, just turn on the television. Not an hour goes by, it seems, without a show about cake, cupcakes, cake competitions or cake decorating. We can't get enough of it.

But the more we stare at those fancy-schmancy cakes, the less content we are with an ordinary bakery cake to celebrate our birthdays and other occasions.

Baker LaVada Holman has seen firsthand how tastes in cakes have changed dramatically over the past 10 years. It's not unusual for her to get requests for three-tiered cakes decorated with fondant icing for a baby's first birthday party. The kind of cake that was once reserved for weddings is becoming common for birthdays and other lesser events.

"People don't want the same old grocery store cake. They want something special. They want something to impress everybody else," Holman said.

A simple layer cake with icing flowers, the birthday standard for years, is no longer acceptable for many people.

But the price of a three-tier fondant creation can stop customers in their tracks. Cakes seen on television typically come with price tags in the thousands.

That's where companies and entrepreneurs are finding their niche - offering decorations to give plain cakes expensive look.

Charynn Olsheski, a chiropractor who lives outside Butler, Pa., caught the bug from watching cake-decorating shows on television. She began practicing with fondant icing and later started baking cakes for family and friends.

The cake decorating was a way to help her and her husband, who also is a chiropractor, make ends meet while establishing their practice and paying down their student loans.

What Olsheski discovered, however, was that no one wanted to pay the kind of prices she had to charge to make the detail work, particularly during the recession. Customers wanted the designer look without the designer price.

That's when Olsheski started to make and sell fondant decorations that customers could use to dress up either a homemade cake or cupcakes, or less expensive cakes purchased at the grocery store.

"I found that people wanted these Cake Boss-type cakes, but did not want to pay me even the kind of money that I wanted," she said. "I came up with this way to send things to them so they could decorate their cakes and cupcakes into something real high-end. They keep the prices down and still make it something fabulous.

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