Sweet Success

June 5, 2009  |  No Comments

At five years old, Roxanne Wickware had obvious artistic talent but it’s only been a little over a year since she found a way to incorporate her artistry into her career. Now, as a freelance baker, she’s able to pick and choose her jobs, and says, “when you find what you’re really meant to do, everything else falls into place.”

By Stephanie Wright

Last Sunday at The Cake Show, which was held at the Artscape Wychwood Barns and produced by the Bonnie Gordon School, Wickware took home first place in the professional designers’ Cake Challenge.

Wickware has come full circle in just about a year and a half with the school. Starting as a full-time apprentice and making mental notes while she washed dishes and assisted in every class, she’d go home and practice what she’d seen being taught during the day. It wasn’t the first time she’d unconventionally attended artistry classes. When she was five, her mother used to dress her in her pajamas in time for an evening art class for adult painters where she learned advanced techniques like pointillism, — the application of tiny dots of pure colour to ‘trick’ the eye into seeing a much wider colour spectrum — but it wasn’t an enjoyable experience and eventually her parents allowed her to stop going.

Since graduating from the school, Wickware has launched her own business, Roxycakes, for which she runs a home office and rents commercial kitchen space to bake and design in. Her goal, which she has already achieved, was to create one cake per week. She likes to take each cake seriously and doesn’t want to get overrun with work.

Becoming a freelance baker wasn’t a direct route, on the advice of her parents, Wickware became a English/French translator. Growing up in Timmins, Ontario, to Francophone parents, French was her first language. It seems though that she inherited more than just the language of French culture from her family; Wickware says, “I love food. All food. … I used to press up against the glass at bakeries, even Starbucks, and admire the look of the baking.” Though she loved to bake, entertain and to paint, it didn’t come together until she walked into a bookstore on her lunch one day and saw Martha Stewart Wedding Cakes. Something just clicked. Within days she’d discovered the Bonnie Gordon School and quit her job. Today, she teaches at the school where she learned everything from.

The kicker? Wickware’s body is highly intolerant of sugar so she can’t test or enjoy anything she makes, let alone any other baked goods. To overcome this challenge, she tested her recipes on everyone she could get to try a sample of her cake. She made feedback cards which she left with local businesses along with 50 samples of cake and asked for clients and employees to taste and comment on the cake: she refined her recipes until they were consistently receiving excellent critical feedback.

Equating her inability to taste her creations to Beethoven’s inability to hear his music, Wickware doesn’t see her particular challenge as a detriment to her career – she knows she’s gone over and above all requirements to ensure her cakes taste heavenly and sees her job as the antidote to her sugar cravings. She even considered calling her business Beethoven’s Cakes.

The ‘cheese’ cake she designed and won with at The Cake Show is currently her pièce de résistance. When she first created it for a wedding in wine country, she knew she’d finally gained the confidence to trust her own creative instincts without looking for inspiration and approval from her peers. Now, she’s looking to create other completely original designs for her clients, “people are looking to me to create a showpiece, they like different and artistic cakes,” she reports, and she’s happy to design and bake them – as long as it’s only one a week!

Roxanne’s website is: roxycakes.ca

Find the other winners from The Cake Show here

Read Catherine’s comment about The Cake Show here

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