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A stack of books, a high heel shoe and a vase of flowers are objects you’d never think to…eat. But in the hands of master baker Kimberly Adams, what you see isn’t what you think. Known for highly detailed artistic cakes that look like other objects, Adams is making a name for herself in the culinary world.
“It’s so fun to look at something and not realize what it is, and then you cut into it, and it’s a cake. It’s a surprise element that people just truly enjoy,” observes the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, native who has several five-figure cash baking competition wins and regular appearances on The Food Network under her toque. Not bad for someone who’s completely self-taught in the art of cake baking and decorating.
Using What Her Mama Gave Her
“I tell everybody I was the kid that loved cakes, so I wanted an Easy-Bake Oven from the time I was about five,” recalls Adams, who was influenced in the kitchen by her Tennessee-born mother, who had a passion for collecting recipe books and specialized in southern-style baking.
“My mom was originally a ‘scratch baker,’ so anytime she had any leftover batter, she would give it to me for my Easy-Bake Oven. And then we moved from that to the real oven.”
Years passed, and though she loved baking for her family, Adams didn’t see a culinary career in the future. Instead, she went on to college to study business and began a position at AT&T in their customer consulting division, which turned into a 15-year career at the telecommunications company. Along the way, she got married and started a family.
Inspiration Strikes for Artistic Cakes
“When I got married and I had kids, I wanted to do their birthday cakes on my own,” she shares about why she got back into baking for her four children, now all grown. “Before that, I did cupcakes for my husband’s fundraiser. I got a Good Housekeeping magazine, bought everything that I needed to make the cupcakes decorated with little animals [featured in the magazine recipe], and that was literally the first thing I made for other people besides my kids. I was like, ‘Oh, I love being creative!” And so that’s how I started my journey of making cakes for people outside of my family.”
Though confident in her baking ability, thanks to the training she received from her mother, Adams felt she needed to upgrade her decorating skills. “The decorating part, that’s the part where I looked at the magazines and YouTube videos and tutorials. I got a lot of the baking books out of the store just to see how they would make the decorated cakes,” she shares about her process for teaching herself to create artistic cakes.
Adams admits art came quickly for her, especially sculpting—which may be why she’s so good at creating her 3-D artistic cakes. “If you asked me to draw a picture of you, it would literally look like a stick figure. But if you asked me to sculpt a cake of you, I can do that,” she says. “I think in terms of my artistic ability, I’m able to sculpt things better than draw.”
With her passion for baking and decorating cakes ignited, Adams threw caution to the wind and opened her own business, Signature Sweets Bakery in Milwaukee, in 2013. There, she began creating trompe l’oeil artistic cakes or “surprise cakes,” as she describes them.
“I get so many requests for those types of cakes now. It’s really a phenomenon,” observes Adams about the popularity of cakes resembling other objects. With each cake—shaped like a loaf of bread, a bowl of Ramen noodles, or a Champagne bottle—her skills for creating artistic cakes grew phenomenally.
Begin With the Cake
To craft her fantastical designs, Adams begins with the cake itself. “Most of my cakes are vanilla cake with a vanilla buttercream or an almond buttercream on the inside. I feel it is more sturdy to work with,” she shares.
“Some of the cakes are softer and so they break easily when you’re trying to carve it. I like to work with cakes that are a little bit colder in order to carve them.”
After carving out the desired silhouette, Adams will cover the cake shape with fondant to serve as the base for her artistic cake, or she’ll reach for modeling chocolate because “it has a better taste than fondant.” Then the detail work begins.
“So it’s all edible paints. And if you’re using modeling chocolate, you’re going to have to use a cocoa base paint because it’s chocolate, of course, so you can’t paint it with a regular edible paint. You have to use a cocoa paint in order to get the realistic colors that you need.”
Depending on the size and type of the cake, it’ll take the master baker anywhere from ten to 12 hours to complete the edible artwork. “It is because of the detailing. If I’m making a cake that looks like a bowl of spaghetti, each spaghetti is its own separate strand. So it’s pretty time-consuming,” notes Adams. Prices for her artistic cakes start at $300 and will usually be big enough to serve at least 20 people.
The Food Network Connection
With her reputation for crafting her fanciful artistic cakes attracting attention, it wasn’t long before The Food Network connection materialized. It came to be when a former AT&T co-worker asked Adams to make a cake.
“It’s such a funny story…One of my coworkers found an ad for a cake contest and used the pictures of my cake [I made for her], and she entered me in it—without telling me. I got a phone call from this casting agency saying, ‘Hey, we loved your cake pictures, we think you’d be perfect for this show that we’re having. It’s a cake competition. Are you interested?’ And I’m like, ‘Sure!’ I had no idea that it was a cake competition in New York and it was for The Food Network. That was my very first time ever competing on camera in front of people. And I actually won that competition and the prize was $10,000.”
The camera loved Adams’s vivacious personality as well as her undeniable creativity in crafting artistic cakes and soon other The Food Network on-camera competitions, cash prize wins and appearances happened like “Champion Cake Challenge,” “Cupcake Wars,” “Halloween Wars, Big Bake” and most recently “Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking.”
Adams even appeared as a judge on The Food Network show “Buddy vs. Duff,” where she judged the cake artistry of the two celebrity chefs.
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Growing Success and New Learnings
Today, Adams spends her time between Food Network appearances and projects in Milwaukee at her Signature Sweets kitchen dreaming up even more whimsical cake creations. Although she has since closed her walk-in bakery by the same name, Adams continues to do business out of a commercial kitchen to fulfill the demands for her special order artistic cakes gracing weddings and other happy celebrations.
“I’m so super grateful for all the orders that I get,” she admits, thankful for the customers who continue to enjoy her skills and allow her to fulfill 20-30 cake orders a month.
The talented, self-taught cake artist even found time to return to school to learn the science behind baking. “I went back to school at [age] 50 to get a pastry arts degree,” she laughs. “Who does that?”
Like her cakes, this chef never fails to surprise, which makes Adams not just an amazing baker but also an artist whose favorite medium just so happens to be cake.
For more information about Kimberly Adams and Signature Sweets, follow on social media.
