by Nichole Livengood / photos by Matt Rose 

Tiffany Good (left), Sarah Resnick (upper right) and Bridgette Cannon (lower right) can make cakes in the shape of just about anything. If she hustles, Sarah Resnick can crank out 25 birthday cakes in a week. But that’s only if her customers are taking it easy on her. More often these days, people realize she can handle all sorts of crazy requests, like making a cake that looks like a Pabst beer can or a stand-up microphone or a life-sized hound dog wearing a handkerchief. That’s because Resnick—along with a handful of other accomplished local pastry chefs—has entered the world of high-concept cake baking, and now, there’s no turning back.

Resnick, a pastry chef at City Bakery in downtown Asheville, picked up her first mixing spoon at six years old. The ex-California girl rose up through the culinary ranks of Biltmore Estate’s Stable Café and then the Inn on Biltmore Estate before she landed the pastry chef job at City Bakery. Now she’s made a name for herself as someone who, like the team on the popular Food Network show Ace of Cakes, can make a traditional buttercream cake look like just about anything—from a guitar to an opossum to a kayak to a wizard hat. Her topsy-turvy, three-tiered pink Playgirl bunny-themed cake (complete with bunny ears) rocked the crowd at an 18-year-old’s birthday bash recently. "Not many people want the standard round tiered cakes we had for our birthday parties as kids anymore," she says. It’s all about bigger, taller and, quite frankly, as outlandish as humanly possible.

Tiffany Good, who started Tiffany’s Baking Co. in Candler in late 2007, also came up through the ranks of professional chefs, training at the Pennsylvania Culinary Institute and then working as a pastry chef at upscale bistros and resorts in Florida. Now, most of her cakes are traditional, but she has carved out a baking niche giving vegans a reason to have their cake and eat it, too. During a recent visit to her shop, there was a flurry of activity as Good and her intern prepared a woodland-themed cake for a vegan wedding. Ornate sugar leaves, flowers, chipmunks and ladybugs lined trays ready for assembly as Good created two large sugary monarch butterflies that eventually sat on top.

 On the big day, Good delivered the cake to an environmentally-conscious couple whose venue was not air-conditioned. Because it was hot outside that day, there was some concern that the cake might melt, but luckily Good had built sturdy dowel rods into the cake’s structure, which meant the butterflies and all the rest of her nature-themed panorama held up fine.

Good says that from beginning sketches to end product, a high-concept vegan special-occasion cake can take as many as 80 hours. The vast majority of her cakes are for weddings, but occasionally she gets to strut her stuff at other high-profile special events. For example, the cake she designed for Asheville’s HATCH Festival in April earned her more than a few kudos and also left people wondering why the thing wasn’t falling over. Based on the festival logo of a jazz musician hatching out of an egg, the cake was a three-tiered chocolate pound cake with truffle filling and a middle tier that looked like a big silvery egg, cracked and lying on its side. She made the eggshell from sugar dough, or gum paste, that dries porcelain hard, and the topper was a sculpted male musician who looked as if he were stepping off of the cake. The whole creation took nearly 40 hours to create and ended up almost 30 inches tall.

But that’s not even the tallest cake Good has ever made. A three-foot-tall wedding cake with a sugar rose topper was so high it almost didn’t make it to cutting. "They had me set that cake up on a table on the dance floor. Every time the waiter walked by, the cake moved," she says, noting that she thought about making everyone at the wedding sign a waiver.

Bridgette Cannon, who started the Asheville Cake Company early this year out of a commercial "microbakery" attached to her home, reports that one of her tallest cakes was a 24-inch replica of Asheville’s City Hall, created for Bele Chere’s 30th Anniversary in 2008. Every four inches, Cannon built in a separator plate and some doweling—like columns in a building, she says. With the right number of rods to keep weight off the bottom layers, Cannon explains, you can make any cake as tall as you want. "If it’s physically impossible because of laws of gravity, we won’t do it, but anything else…" is fair game, she says.

Last year for the Asheville Film Festival, Cannon created a cake in the shape of an old movie camera that looked more like a piece of art than an edible. Complete with two film reels and canisters and a little director’s chair and megaphone, the cake took close to three weeks to finish, Cannon says.

Yes, the outsides of Cannon’s cakes are remarkable. But the work that goes into the insides is also impressive. In her underground cake-baking lair just outside downtown Asheville, Cannon revealed the secret behind her approximately 40 cake flavors, including mint mojito, samba (orange cayenne mango), stout pound cake with roasted pecans and Irish whiskey soaking syrup, Caribbean ginger molasses and her signature hyper vanilla pound cake. "We make our own extracts," she says, picking up a bottle of brandy with vanilla husks floating as proof. Cannon’s recipes are rooted in the recipe for her grandmother’s pound cake, which she ate as a kid growing up in coastal South Carolina.

Not all cakes can be created equal. Even with all the talent and ingenuity in the world, the cake gods (or the weather) can throw you a curveball. "Weather can be the most difficult factor," Cannon says. "We absolutely cannot walk a cake through rain. Water is the villain when it comes to fondant." Good says every egg and bag of flour is different. "If it’s raining or hot or cold outside…all of these factors can affect a cake," she says. Over time, you simply learn to adapt and re-tool.

Resnick says she avoids delivery mishaps by assembling most of her cakes on site. Good finds that she can usually steer clear of disasters by delivering her cakes pre-stacked and secured with dowels. Driving at a snail’s pace doesn’t hurt either, she says. Cannon was once so worried about the head falling off of a 20-inch dog cake that she rode in the back of the delivery vehicle for the entire two-hour drive to Fontana Dam—laying on her side. "The fact that I couldn’t feel the left side of my body is just the kind of sacrifice we make," she says. "We’re cake freaks."

To see more high-concept cakes, check out the bakers’ websites: ashevillecakecompany.com, citybakery.net and tiffanysbakingco.com.