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closeShe takes the cake
Spring Mills woman renowned for sugar art
by Robin Crawford
Describing what Kim Morrison does with sugar and frosting as simply “cake decorating” is like describing what Michelangelo did to the Sistine Chapel as simply “painting.”
CDT/Nabil K. Mark
Kim hand pipes a design on a cake. Kim Morrison is a cake designer and sugar artist who has perfected her craft over the last 24 years. Morrison, who lives in Spring Mills, Pa., has twice won the wedding cake National Championship and has appeared on the Food Network numerous times. CDT/Nabil K. Mark
To brides, she’s a fairy godmother, creating storybook wedding cakes with a wave of her rolling pin and poufy rainbow clouds of color and edible glitter.
To other clients of Cakes for Occasions, the custom-cake business she’s run out of her Spring Mills home for 24 years, she’s a magician, conjuring elaborate cakes in the shape of carousels, Faberge eggs, Corinthian columns, golf bags, treasure chests overflowing with loot. She’s painted a cake in the style of Majolica pottery, and topped a luau-themed cake with a handmade boar’s head on a floral platter.
If you can dream it, she can make it out of sugar and put it on a cake.
“I love being part of celebrations and happy times, and I’m always interested in trying new things,” she said.
To viewers of the Food Network, she’s the 2003 and 2004 grand-prize winner of the National Wedding Cake Competition, where she placed third last year and now is a judge. Her cakes and techniques have been featured on the Food Network programs “Here Comes the Cake” and “Wedding Cake Classic.”
To fellow sugar artists like B. Keith Ryder, president of the International Cake Exploration Society, an organization for professional sugar artists, and a frequent competitor of Kim’s, she’s nothing short of amazing.
“More than anything, she’s known for her flowers,” he said. “Between her craftsmanship and magnificent eye for color, they’re so deep and rich looking, you just want to sniff them.”
Creative visions
Kim grew up in McKeesport, where she, a younger sister and her parents shared a house with her grandparents and great-aunt Besse. “We lived downstairs and they lived upstairs,” she said. “It was wonderful. And if somebody got mad at me on one floor, I went to other floor.”
She began studying art in Philadelphia, but left to join a boyfriend at Penn State. It was there, in the university’s glass-blowing studio, that she met Gil Morrison.
The first cake she ever decorated was the cake for her and Gil’s wedding. A friend was making it and needed last-minute help, so Kim picked up a pastry bag and did as she was told.
“When you’ve worked with a glass pipe and clay and brushes, picking up a piping bag isn’t all that different,” she said.
Kim had found her calling. “I like to do functional things that are beautiful — that’s what I liked about glass blowing,” she said. “It’s what I love about doing this, because the cake has to be delicious, but as the focal point, it has to be beautiful as well, and I like that interplay.”
Information was scarce in those pre-Internet days. But Kim managed to sign up for a sugar art newsletter or two, passports to a world she hadn’t known existed. “I was like, ‘wow!’ the first time I saw one,” she said. “I couldn’t believe some of the things people were doing.”
She began coming up with new ways to achieve her creative visions. Dissatisfied with the taste of the traditional rolled fondant decorators use that provides a smooth, flawless finish, she developed a smooth and pliable butter cream fondant frosting. She began to play with sugar flowers as well.
“I was determined I was going to make roses that were as thin as actual rose petals,” she said. Eventually, she figured out that petals needed to be thin enough to read through before they would mimic the gentle beauty of the real thing. She learned that layers of powdered food color created subtle color shades, and found that steaming the flowers added to the depth of the color.
Competition cakes like “Roses for Besse,” the 2003 grand-prize winner of the National Wedding Cake Competition, require somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 hours of labor, not to mention countless hours coming up with the design. Kim drew inspiration from china she inherited from her beloved Aunt Besse to create the four-tiered wedding cake the never-married Besse might have had. A tiny table setting, featuring a fine lace cloth, teacup, saucer, plate and gossamer note paper — all made of sugar — completed the entry.
“I don’t do a competition cake that I don’t learn something from,” she said. “But whatever I learn all trickles down to my other work.”
Flower Show
It’s early January, and there are wild roses in bloom in Kim’s kitchen. Each is suspended inches above a block of foam, balanced atop a thin silver wire. Their delicate petals are unfurled, traces of powdery pollen spilling across their rich colors.
“Those are competition roses,” Kim says, looking up from the minute speck of gum paste she’s just pulled from a bag. Each rose takes up to three hours to make. It often takes seven or more layers of various colors to achieve the lifelike nuance for which her flowers are renowned.
She might use two dozen roses on a competition cake, depending on the design and theme, plus other flowers, including her favorite touch: bunches of tiny lilacs, each and every tiny petal pinched and pulled, snipped and rolled thinner and thinner before being shaped more and painted.
“Those are the ones that are really time intensive,” she said.
There might be easier ways, and maybe no one else would be able to tell if a rose had only say, five layers of coloring, but Kim won’t cut corners. She nods toward the wild roses on the counter. There are plenty of suppliers who make realistic stamens for sugar-art flowers, but for Kim, only one kind, handmade by a fellow sugar artist in England, will do. “I think we all see more than we recognize,” she said. “Nobody’s going to look at a cake and say, ‘Gee, what beautiful stamens,’ but they can tell there’s something special about it.”
After nearly 2,000 wedding cakes, she’s slowed her pace, down from almost 200 wedding cakes and hundreds of party cakes each year to 70 or 80 wedding cakes, and 300 or so party cakes.
Prices for Kim’s cakes run from $25 for a basic, eight-inch cake to anywhere from $2.75 to $9 per serving for more complex creations, not including flowers or cake toppers.
Until recently, she had a small staff to help run the kitchen. Delivering spectacular cakes on site and on time requires all the organization and teamwork of a military operation, especially when dealing with multiple events — she once did twelve weddings in one weekend.
“People think the decorating must take forever, but it doesn’t,” Kim said. “It’s the organizing, planning, shopping, working with florist, the setup. That’s what takes the most time. And of course the baking can’t be done ahead of time.”
Reannie Rider was Kim’s main assistant until Kim decided to scale back. She handled everything from dishes and cleanup to baking cakes. “Weekends could be stressful, but everything always came together,” Reannie said. “She did whatever it took to make sure each bride’s cake was the perfect cake for that bride.”
Cakes up to 30 inches tall are finished at the house, then transported to the event site. Really large cakes are taken in pieces and assembled on site. Gil, a contractor, helps ensure the cakes’ structural stability and is in charge of deliveries. “In this business, gravity rules,” he said. “After that, it’s force and momentum.”
The Morrisons’ two grown children delighted in their mother’s creations while growing up.
“We always had the coolest birthday cakes,” Kim’s daughter Dana said. “I think it was fifth grade, we did an “Upside Down” party where we ate the cake first, under the table. The cake had a forest theme, and she made all the decorations upside down — the trees were upside down, the ground was on top of cake, sky on bottom.”
Dana, a photography major at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, said studying art has given her a greater appreciation for her mom’s work. “I think it’s amazing,” she said. “And it’s weird seeing these works of art coming out of our house, and knowing they’ll only last a few hours because people are going to eat them.”
Kim has no problem watching hours of loving effort just disappear.
“Work is not precious. It’s just sugar,” she said. “That’s the first thing I teach my classes. Your hands, your eyes, your mind — those are the things that are precious.”
In Print
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