The best cake bakeries

It's interesting:
"It was 48 hours before the wedding and I had zero best man speech made. 2 hours ... You can find speech material to suit any style of wedding. It blends the ..."

Beyond the colorful, tempting displays of sweets and the rich, lingering aroma of cakes baking, the best bakeries stand out by doing a number of things consistently well. The Modern Baking website includes the quality of ingredients, marketing, merchandising and management's involvement as a few factors that define the best cake bakeries. Determining which bakeries are tops is subjective, but savvy sweet teeth know it when they taste it.

Add this to my Recipe Box.

1. Branding

   • Located in Hoboken, New Jersey, and watched throughout the country on the TLC reality show "Cake Boss," Carlo's Bakery (carlosbakery.com) sells thousands of specialty cakes every year. While customers give the cakes two thumbs up, this bakery truly excels in merchandising and branding departments. The wedding and specialty cakes have been featured in "Modern Bride" and "The Knot" and several times on the Food Network. Sprinkles Cupcakes, with its 11 locations throughout the country, as well as television and magazine profiles, is another bakery with simple signature designs that are immediately recognizable.

   Show-Stopping Presentation

   • The numerous reality cake shows, books and magazines, are evidence that visual presentation of cakes is as, if not more, important than the taste, as most of the readership and audience never has the opportunity to try the edible works of art features. One example of a successful bakery building its name on presentation is Simon Lee Bakery (simonleebakery.com). Awarded "Pick of the Knot" for best wedding cakes 2007 through 2010 and Bride's Choice Award in 2010, Simon Lee Bakery offers fine cakes from Austin, Texas. For weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, special occasions and grooms' cakes, Simon Lee has built a reputation for flavor and jaw-dropping cake towers. Famous cakes include an elegant eight-layered cake called the Hilton and Chocolate Bow four-layered cakes with chocolate streamers swirled down the sides. Masse's pastries in Berkeley, California, adds bold, intricate piping to subdued fondant for its elegant wedding cakes, including those featured in "InStyle Weddings" magazine.

   Classics Done Right

   • Combining complimentary flavors and textures and making them work in a moist cake is an art. Referring to the Brown Sugar Bakery (ilovefoodgroup.com/brownsugarbakery), the "Chicago Tribune" advised readers to "get your cake fix here" in a round-up of the best bakeries in Chicago. Residents, NBA players, authors and artists go for specialties such as the caramel cake, pineapple coconut and German chocolate. In the South, cravings for the classics are readily satisfied in Atlanta at Matty's Cakes. From carrot and red velvet, to double chocolate and banana, the rave reviews make it easy to see why this bakery offers cupcakes in supersize.

   Quality Ingredients

   • As many chefs would agree, food can only taste as good as the ingredients used to make it. Any cake lover can reason that the same notion applies to cakes. Sweet Lady Jane (sweetladyjane.com) in Los Angeles uses pure, quality ingredients in wedding and specialty cakes. Instead of preservatives or hydrogenated fats, the bakery uses natural butter, imported chocolate and fresh fruit to create real flavors. In addition to specialty cakes, it offers a chocolate candied-orange layered cake and a moist dulce de leche cake. In New England, Jacques Pastries focuses on using the highest quality of ingredients to create rich cake flavors including ginger, spice, espresso and almond cakes.

Source: www.ehow.com

Tags: specialty cakes, best cake, best cake bakeries, cake bakeries, best bakeries, quality ingredients