Her Own Sweet Time

People travel from across the country to learn the old-school baking techniques of Tobey deChristopher.

Photography by Michael Kane

Last spring, when most of us had willingly done the government’s bidding and jumped forward into daylight savings time, Tobey deChristopher was puttering around her Seattle bake shop, refusing to lose that mandated hour, content to live in the past.

The clock on her wall remained unchanged as she taught several young women to decorate wedding cakes with edible flowers by using dental tools and toothpicks —working slowly, by hand, in a style most would describe as old-school.

Her approach has not hindered business at the Artisan Cake Guild. DeChristopher, 53, who runs the tiny baking-and-teaching studio on Western Avenue in Seattle, fields calls from would-be clients as far away as Florida. Students travel from Texas and Missouri to learn her techniques — how to create blooms from gum paste and blown sugar, for instance. In July, her Web site was getting so many hits that Yelp called to ask what all the fuss was about.

Cake is cake, she likes to say. Wedding cake is structure. And, surprisingly, almost nobody here teaches it. “There are pastry classes, yes, but the wedding-cake part is always at the end, and a lot of people only want to learn that,” says deChristopher, who was stunned when, in 2004, she had to go all the way to Chicago to find a capable instructor herself.

The economic downturn seems only to have increased her client base. While a bride-to-be might easily spend thousands on the crowning dessert, deChristopher’s students drop one hundred to three hundred dollars to learn what she calls “the sugar arts” and walk away with elegant confections for a pittance.

A bake-shop student carefully applies icing.

“They’re coming either to get their minds off of what’s happening in the economy or to focus on something beautiful, or just do some quiet work,” she said. “I think it’s because of comfort, the comfort of making cakes. And, of course, people are still getting married.”

There is no major school of wedding-cake baking. It was something deChristopher picked up by taking the odd class here and there after she developed an allergy to flour and was forced to reconsider life as a bread baker. “I thought that would be a career-ender,” she said. “Then I met a young woman who was getting married and having a potluck wedding and I realized that there’s this vast pool of people who don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a Martha Stewart wedding.”

A stout woman with twinkly eyes who wears her hair pulled into a tight bun, deChristopher bustles around her studio neatening shelves of colored powder and chirping about the evils of Safeway frosting. Typically, her students are ambitious amateurs — mothers, sisters or friends of the bride. DeChristopher has taught architects, psychologists, corporate types and physicians — as well as pastry professionals — all of whom come to experience the peculiarly meditative effects of baking from scratch.

“It’s really calming,” said Carmen Hall, 37, a laid-off telecom manager, who was fashioning blown-sugar bows under deChristopher’s tutelage on a recent Sunday. She’d been inspired after struggling to make a red velvet cake for her father’s sixtieth birthday. “I really like baking, but I’m not fantastic at it,” Hall said. “This seemed like a good way to make something that’s not fantastic fancier.”

Gum-paste poppies wait for the big day.

At that point, it was two p.m., and Hall, with two friends, had been working for more than three hours. Strewn on the table in front of them were golden curlicues, an iridescent pink fish and a miniature high-heeled shoe, all made of blown sugar. Other students spend afternoons sculpting poppies and freesia out of gum paste and egg whites.

“This isn’t fast work, but people like me are more comfortable with the way things used to be,” said deChristopher, who didn’t own a computer until 2003 and waited another three years before using a cell phone. “It’s part of my tradition, the tradition of doing things slowly.”

It’s a family inheritance. DeChristopher’s brother is a marble sculptor, tapping at rock with the same tools artists used during the Renaissance, and her father is a designer. So there is some irony in the fact that they are perhaps best known for inventing Boboli Pizza, the mass-market version of a do-it-yourself dinner. DeChristopher and her father created the recipe during the early 1980s and sold it to General Foods in 1986.

The cake maker herself, Tobey deChristopher

“After they bought our company, they just slaughtered the bread — they cheapened the quality and made their own sauce,” deChristopher says with a shrug. “I don’t even recognize it.”

Though she still keeps her hand in the commercial end of the industry as a butter tester for Darigold, improving the quality of cakes has become something like a political act. DeChristopher recently recast her retail bakery, formerly known as Sugar!, into a guild and plans to marshal a troop of confectioners to take on the looming monolith that is slab cake.

“Your typical wedding cake is so often just a mix slapped together with raspberry glue paste in the middle, and that’s not a nice thing,” she said, shaking her head with regret. “We want to support each other and elevate cakes.”