“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”
by digby
Heather Anne Leavitt, the cake designer and proprietress behind Ann Arbor’s boutique cakery, Sweet Heather Anne, makes a lot of high-end, super-detailed cakes, so she didn’t blink when a woman met with her to place an order for an expensive cake to be delivered to The West End Grill for a private party.
She didn’t find out until she and her assistant delivered the cake to the upscale Ann Arbor restaurant that the cake was to be one of the centerpieces of a birthday celebration that Governor Rick Snyder was throwing for his wife, Sue.
“The weird thing about it is we didn’t know it was for them,” said Leavitt. “We worked with a really nice woman – I’m not sure if she was a planner or what her position is. With birthday cakes we don’t normally meet the recipient. They came in with some pretty specific ideas of the things they wanted in the cake and then I designed it based on what they wanted.”
The designs included a bag from Chanel, a box from Tiffany & Co., a diamond necklace and a box from Nordstrom, which Leavitt rendered in cake and fondant. The cake took 30 hours to design, bake and decorate.
“The way we price, we break it down to a per-serving fee and then a labor fee,” explained Leavitt, who declined to reveal the price of the cake. “Even though it looked big, it wasn’t that big of a cake in terms of servings. It was only 60 servings. So most of what they were charged was for the labor.”
Leavitt said that though much of the work they do at Sweet Heather Anne’s is for weddings, where designs run the gamut from simple buttercream frostings to intricate fondant cakes, they also do a lot of work for The University of Michigan, which orders cakes with a similar level of detail for donors.
Leavitt said though she had no idea that the governor and his wife were to be the recipients of this cake, she was grateful that they had chosen to work with a very small, local business.
This is the cake. I’m not kidding:
