Manhattan Bride Magazine, Spring/Summer 2000

Outrageous Cakes offers 100 flavors for your cake and innumerable choices for its color, shape, and design. You may remember their creations from TV: On 'One Life to Live' Asa Buchanan's 10th wedding, from 'All My Children', the wedding cakes of Tad & Dixie, Tad & Gloria, Noah & Julia and Adam & Liza.

To create your cake, the first question Charmaine Jones asks is, "Do you have a theme?" If you have not gotten that far in your planning, or do not have a specific theme, Charmaine talks to you about the types of flowers you've chosen to decorate the reception site, and if you want flowers on your cake.

The ever-creative cake maker may also ask about the colors of your room and come up with alternatives to flowers based on the decor of your site. "Another fun option," she adds, "is to create a cake that complements the style of your dress."

Brides go to Outrageous Cakes for their unique artistry. For one couple who enjoys the wonders of the sea, they created an underwater-theme cake with a scuba diving groom (complete with tanks and mask). The bride was portrayed as a beautiful mermaid atop an edible rock.

For another bride, Charmaine and her staff created a fairy tale wedding, with a castle-on-a-hill-cake that didn't spare any details. They made another cake come alive by incorporating a fishbowl with live goldfish between the stacks of a magnificent tall cake.

One of their most innovative cakes appeared in a book about African wedding, 'Jumping the Broom' by Harriet Cole. It was an Afro-centric wedding cake, the first made by a professional cake artist. The four-tier hexagon had colorful, finely detailed African tapestries on each face. There was a huge response, and requests for African cakes poured in from all over the country and beyond.

Many couple in Manhattan and the tri-state area opt to have a richly cultural African wedding, with African drummers and dancing. The bride and groom wear traditional garb and often asks their guests to do the same. African symbols on the cake include edible cowrie shells (white shells that used to be used as currency), statues of white chocolate dusted with cocoa, and brides and grooms adorned in African costumes.

"African Americans like richer tastes, such as flavorful fruits, rum, and chocolate. Jamaican black cake is traditional for Jamaican and Caribbean weddings. This special cake is made with fruits soaked in rum for a full year. For Dominican weddings, ingredients are shipped from the Dominican Republic. "Eggs are folded by hand, and the special icing recipe tastes like marshmallows." For Hispanic weddings Charmaine incorporates guava and tropical flavors into the cake filling, and at caucasian wedding "lemon poppy seed cake is always a favorite."

Overall, their most popular creation is pink champagne cake with coconut filling.

"We practice the art of cake, not the art of fake, and therefore everything on the cake is edible." Looking at these cakes, you won't miss the plastic toppers!

Outrageous Cakes, 212 722 0678