Beverly Starr of Sweet Dreams Designer Cakes stood behind her table at Reed & Cross’ recent open house, enticing hundreds of visitors with slices of wedding cake.
Lonnie Tharp, a man touring the wedding gallery, approached the table, examined each flavor and strolled away with a thick slab of banana fudge.
“We have all kinds of flavors,” Starr said, “from raspberry swirl to apple spice, German chocolate, almond poppy seed, carrot cake — I could go on and on.”
Moments later, Tharp returned to the table. “You can roll around in that cake, it’s so good,” he told Starr, who has been a full-time cake designer since 1989.
Many people at the open house returned for seconds.
“Any cakes with raspberry are especially popular,” Starr said as she arranged more samples on the table.
Designing an elaborate wedding cake can take days. Starr’s largest, most expensive cake took three days to create. It sold for $1,500.
“It was probably about six feet tall,” she said. “I had to stand on a ladder to reach the top two tiers.”
Cakes so enormous are rare, though, according to Nicole Wergeland, co-owner of Inn-Spired Cakes. Wergeland and business partner Melissa Coray have sold gourmet wedding cakes in Eugene for more than a year.
“Our typical wedding cake begins with a three-tiered stack with butter cream frosting,” Wergeland said. “Then we embellish the cake with pillars, fresh flowers and designs piped on with frosting.
“Tahitian vanilla with strawberries and whipped cream is one of our most popular cakes,” she said.
An Inn-Spired cake usually costs around $400, but Wergeland also has experience with more expensive, extravagant designs.
“Depending on the size of the reception, the intricacy of the design and the number of side cakes, you could spend up to $2,500,” she said.
Such an elaborate cake is baked and designed piece by piece, then assembled at the last moment, Wergeland said. The entire project can take four days.
That’s a lot of frosting, but Wergeland admits her job isn’t always so sweet, especially when it comes to delivery.
“It can get kind of hairy when you’re in the back of a van, carting someone’s wedding cake up a windy mountain logging road,” Wergeland said.