Lady of the Cake
At Dulce Desserts, Juanita Lane transforms sugar, butter and eggs into ‘evil deliciousness’
by Carrington Fox
On the back of a box of cake mix, there’s usually a helpful illustration of the required ingredients: two eggs, water, a quarter-cup of oil, maybe some butter. Preheat, stir and cook for about an hour. Slap on some frosting, and you’ve got yourself a cake. If pastry chef Juanita Lane, owner of Dulce Desserts, wanted to draw a picture of her ingredients, she’d need a hell of a lot more space than just the back of a cake box. As for the time…it could take her an hour just to crack the eggs.
She’s not giving away the recipes, but Lane and her assistant Madelyn Reynolds make everything from scratch—cupcakes, cookies, cakes and pie—in a blue building in the Edgehill Village, where, coincidentally, another woman-owned bakery sat decades ago. To some, the glass-fronted store may look like an old-world confectionary, a happy place where neighbors pop in for a cupcake and a chat. But to Lane, a corporate dropout who abandoned a career in international sales to nurture a sweet culinary passion, the boutique is a dastardly lair, the nexus of what she calls “evil deliciousness.”
Butter, sugar and eggs are the WMDs in Lane’s caloric axis of evil. “I don’t believe in anything light.” She says.
Nor does she believe in shortcuts.
To make a four-tier wedding cake for nuptials on a Saturday, Lane starts baking on Thursday. To feed 110 in-laws and drunken bridesmaids, she starts with about 10 pounds of butter and as many as 70 eggs.
Step 1
Using 6 pounds of butter for the batter, Lane bakes eight cakes that she will stack two per layer. The cooking takes about four hours, after which she wraps and cools the cakes completely.
Step 2
On Friday, Lane “tortes” the cakes, meaning she slices each one in half horizontally, to create a total of 16 layers. That’s four layers of cake per tier, which leaves a lot of room for frostings and fillings, which come in a variety as broad as Lane’s enthusiasm and a bride’s imagination. There’s white chocolate buttercream, homemade caramel sauce, lemon curd and almond buttercream. There’s raspberry, chocolate ganache and Italian cherry. And it’s all homemade, except for the imported preserves and the fondant used to cover the cakes with flawless, smooth surfaces. And Lane runs down to The Italian Market to get the perfect Italian cherries.
Step 3
Filling and frosting a cake take a couple hours—and pounds and pounds of butter, which gets creamed with egg whites, sugar and vanilla to make a decadent buttercream frosting. Each cake gets a base coat of buttercream, called a crumb coat. Once a cake is primed, it goes into the refrigerator to chill before Lane adds a second coat for a sleek buttercream finish.
Step 4
On Saturday, Lane kicks the artistry into high gear, decorating and assembling the cake. The self-taught chef (Lane attends regular workshops by renowned pastry chefs to hone her skills) adorns her confections with edible masterpieces from playful patterns of bumblebees and hearts to sugared lace, intricate gift bows and dogwood leaves that look as if they floated down from a spring branch. For a fondant cake, she rolls and drapes the sweet sheets of sugar paste—like sugar Play-Doh—over the tiers and hand-paints each layer.
For her whimsical topsy-turvy cakes, which look like something out of a Dr. Seuss cookbook, Lane assembles the layers on site at the event, a harrowing process that she describes as “Food Fear Factor.”
An Ivy League alumna and single mother who spent a decade selling automotive equipment before mortgaging her house to start Dulce, Lane marvels at her own transition from industrial oil salesperson to neighborhood cake lady. “I have a weird natural talent,” she says.
Dulce Desserts 1207 Villa Place, 321-8700
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