The Origins of Spider-Ben...and Evil Cake Genius

People often ask how a mild-mannered cake lady transformed into The Evil Cake Genius.  I'd like to tell a tale of a radio-active cake spider, and an evil government plot to take over the world one cake at a time.  Alas, the story isn't quite that sexy...although it does involve Spiderman.

Travel with me, cakey sidekicks, to the year of our Lord 2010.

I was minding my own business, making a graduation cake for Ben.  A self-professed book-nerd and lover of all things video game and comic book related, he was my dream client for a grad cake.  I came away from the appointment with a list of new books and video games to try out in the off season, and one big problem.

How can this mild-mannered cake lady possibly do justice to a comic book classic, Spiderman, when the client is a true aficionado of the genre?  A hand-painted comic, would not only be imperfect, but would take an obscene amount of time, that in the middle of wedding and graduation season, simply isn't available.

So I looked into having a custom stencil cut.  But the level of detail I needed just couldn't be achieved without the stencil falling apart.  What I really needed was a stencil that was attached to a fine backer that could hold all of the individual pieces of the stencil together, but still let frosting go through. 

Ouch!

What was that?

I think I just got bit by a Radioactive spider.

And so was born, the Mesh Stencil (insert trumpet chorale here) and...the Evil Cake Genius.

To get the color, we made several photocopies of the original art, and cut out with an craft-knife, the areas that were to be red on one sheet, blue on another, and layered them over the Mesh Stenciled pattern and airbrushed teh color over them.  Pretty sweet...Spider-Ben approved.

Enter Misha.

The same week that we were making Ben's graduation cake, I had a design meeting with one of my brides, Misha.  When she brought in samples of the Toile fabric that she was having made into chair covers, I swooned and panicked all at once.  Mild-mannered cake lady wanted to include that gorgeous pattern on the cake, but was far too intimidated by the amount of hand-painted perfection it would require.  But Evil Cake Genius said "let's do it!" and promised Misha a cake covered in completely edible Toile ribbons.  The Spiderman victory had clearly inflated her cakey-ego.

So, Misha went on her merry way, and mild-mannered cake lady curled into the fetal position on her bakery floor, eating handfuls of chocolate chips, and swaying back and forth chanting "what have I done? ... what have I done?"

Evil Cake Genius just laughed her evil Bwa ha ha, and had another mesh stencil made. 

And, Cakey-sidekicks, that is how it all started.  Spiderman and Toile, like peas and carrots, right?

Now, to be truly evil, would be to hog all of this new cake-awesomeness for herself, but remember...mild-mannered cake lady is still in there holding steady, so we opened EvilCakeGenius.com (because Mild-ManneredCakeLady.com sounds lame) and have created thousands of Evil Cake Minions in the process.  Ahhh, Evil never felt so good.

Since then, we've added more Toile patterns to our collection.  A full-size Classic Toile, and even a charming-little-french-kids-doing-french-things Kid's Toile pattern in one or even two color!