me know right when you got engaged, you probably weren’t getting one of my cakes.” She pulls down two big albums of wedding cake pictures, their covers showing a fine trace of flour dust. The photos show multi-tiered cakes, ranging up to six feet tall or more, and covered, top to bottom, with sugar sculptures of flowers, vines, decorative swirls, and whatever else the imagination can conjure from a sugar mixture she calls gum paste. “It’s like a dough. I taught myself how to form it into specific shapes.” For all the physical stress, for all the long workdays with inconvenient hours, the bakers agree they wouldn’t have it any other way. “I love to cook,” says Brandon Kop at Stick Boy in Boone. “If I ran into a bunch of money, I might just become a professional fisherman, but this is a great life. Beyond daydreams I can’t imagine doing anything else. I certainly wouldn’t want to go into a corporate office every day.” Vince Donatelli pauses to consider the question. “I love baking and I love teaching. It ’s a hard question. I’ve got a good combination right now.” Sarah Resnick at City Bakery was quick with her response. “I love the satisfaction of being able to see what I did during the day. I can’t imagine hav i ng a n of f ic e job where at the end of the day I may have been very productive, but all I’ve done is write a bunch of Excel spreadsheets. Being in the kitchen I start with butter, sugar, and flour, and I create a five-tier wedding cake. That’s awesome, and I love that.” Matthew Hickman at Underground Baking Company in Hendersonville considered the alternatives. “I would go nuts. Every time I complain about my back pain or getting up at 2:30 in the morning, I think about the alternatives and…” His voice trails off, and he continues on a different tack. “It’s just that you’re wired for it. It’s in your genes. There are just those of us out there who live and breathe the business. There’s something about the person that keeps you in this business.”
Karen Donatelli adds her own perspective to the physical demands. “I’m on my feet hours and hours at a time. There was a weekend in May when I had so many wedding cakes that I worked a 40-hour shift, nonstop.”
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