By B.C. Manion
When it comes to baking and decorating cakes, Noemi Carambot has a clear focus.
She wants the cake she makes for customers to be the kind of cake she’d want to present at special occasions for family and friends.
After all, that’s how this woman from Puerto Rico got her start in cake decorating: She began by making cakes in her kitchen to celebrate special times with her loved ones.
Before launching her business, Carambot was a school teacher. She routinely made cakes for her students and for birthdays, baby showers and the like.
She was in the midst of decorating one of those cakes one day when a neighbor dropped by her house and told her: “You should sell your cakes.”
Carambot thought her friend was crazy and she didn’t give the notion another thought until she was out shopping for a baby shower a few months later and ran across the opportunity to take a cake-decorating class.
She decided to go for it.
Suffice it to say, a lot of flour, sugar and eggs have come into Carambot’s life since then.
After taking the class, she began creating custom-made cakes part-time. That was in 1994. Over time, it became a full-time pursuit as her family moved from Puerto Rico to Tampa Bay.
In recent years, she worked out of a commercial kitchen at the Tampa Scottish Rite Masonic Center on Memorial Drive, in Town ‘N Country.
Just a few months ago, the company called, L’Artisan Cake Atelier, set up its first storefront at 131 Flagship Drive, off US 41 in Lutz.
It’s a family affair, with Carambot, daughter Merli Rodriguez and son-in-law Jaime Miranda making and decorating the cakes.
Carambot’s husband, Francisco, helps wherever he’s needed and her son, Francisco “Tony” Rodriguez, does chores around the shop and handles marketing and public relations.
Carambot said her daughter is a masterful decorator who got an early start in learning the art: “She grew up watching me, working on this.”
The shop is open by appointment only.
“We like to have time with our clients,” Carambot explained.
The goal is to give the customers the cake they desire, while paying attention to the customer’s budget, Carambot said.
“Sometimes they come for a wedding and they have less than 50 guests. We try to work the cake to be three tiers. If it is not possible, they use two tiers. Sometimes we suggest they use a dummy cake to make it look bigger,” Carambot said.
“Sometimes they have huge weddings, 300 or 400 guests, but they don’t have the budget ….We offer them our 100-guest cake that actually feeds 120. They work the rest with sheet cakes.”
They offer wedding cake in various flavors, including vanilla, amaretto, chocolate, cream cheese, marble and a red velvet they developed themselves.
Wedding cakes start at $3.75 per slice, but can cost as much as $8 a slice, depending on how much styling the customer desires.
The shop offers various fillings, as well.
It lends out its cake stands instead of renting them, but the stands must be returned to the shop.
Throughout the years, the business has built a customer base of more than a thousand clients, attracting most through bridal shows, the Internet or word of mouth.
Unlike many businesses, this one has done well during the recession. It expects to be even busier when the economy improves.
In fact, Carambot said the shop is already starting to see an uptick in large weddings.
Carambot’s calendar is filled with notations of upcoming events. “We have weddings already for next year,” she said.
Typically, the family needs advance notice of about a week for a special occasion cake and a couple of months’ notice for a wedding cake, Carambot said.
But is has been known to handle rush orders on occasion.
“Our cakes are all made from scratch,” Carambot said.
“Our fondant is made from scratch. It is made of sugar, marshmallows and vanilla. We melt the marshmallows. We add the sugar and the vanilla and then we knead it.”
Kneading the fondant is a big job that falls primarily to Carambot’s son-in-law, who spends most Mondays working on it.
Many people don’t like the taste of fondant, Carambot said, but she suspects that’s because they’ve never tasted fondant made from scratch.
The cake shop makes some cakes with buttercream frosting, but it recommends fondant be used for wedding cakes. “That way, you get a perfect look,” Carambot said.
“There are some types of decorations that can only be done on fondant,” she explained. “There are kinds of drapings, kinds of lace,” she said.
The family prides itself on its handmade sugar flowers, which look so authentic that they could have come directly from a garden or a florist’s shop.
They achieve that look by creating each flower by hand. It is painstaking work. It can take four hours just to create a single tiger lily. They also make roses, peace lilies and other flowers.
“We use a powder that comes from South Africa. It lets us make a flower that looks just like a real flower,” Carambot said.
One of her favorite moments comes when a customer sees one of their decorated cakes and exclaims: “The flowers are real,” to which the cake decorator proudly responds, “No, they’re made from sugar.”
When someone buys a cake from her shop, most of the price is based on how much labor was required to create it, Carambot said.
Running a cake shop keeps the family hopping.
“Last week we got here at around 9 a.m. Friday and we ended up getting home at around 9 p.m. the following night,” Tony Rodriguez said.
They had to finish five wedding cakes and deliver them to Ruskin, West Tampa and South Tampa.
The business has even delivered cakes to foreign lands, such as the Philippines, Austria and China.
The shop’s busiest months for weddings are May, June, July, October and November.
The company also makes cakes for baby showers, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, birthday parties, retirement parties and other special occasions.
The decorators keep up their skills and develop new ones by attending seminars and conferences.
At one of those seminars, Carambot took lessons from Nicholas Lodge, who made the cake for Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding.
Getting a storefront location has been one of the company’s ambitions. Some day, it hopes to have its own stand-alone building.
Carambot also wants her company to compete some day in a Food Network challenge.
In the meanwhile, she’s content to focus on the orders at hand.
The size of her kitchen has changed, but Carambot sticks to her original premise: She wants to make cakes that make others happy.
For more information, call (813) 789-8407 or go to www.lartisancakeatelier.com.
