Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Oakleaf.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Amanda. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I grew up baking with my mom and both of my grandmothers. So it was always super important both to make your own birthday cake and cakes for family members growing up. After high school I worked at Cold Stone Creamery as a shift manager while I attended college. One afternoon I had some free time and decided to learn how to decorate ice cream cakes ‘professionally.’ I studied Cold Stone’s manual and taught myself how to frost and simply decorate ice cream cakes. Now, if you haven’t worked with ice cream cakes before, you must learn to be quick. You can’t take your sweet time frosting those cakes. You have about 10 minutes before they start to melt underneath, so I learned how to frost a cake quite quickly.
I worked at Cold Stone for 6 years; in that time, I climbed the ladder to both Store Manager and manager/overseer of all ice cream cake making and decorating. This gave me plenty of experience in the world of food service, managing employees, health inspections, and customer service. I worked my way up until my status was right below the owners’; I basically ran the store for them.
While I was still in college and working at Cold Stone, I picked up another job doing gift baskets, event planning and decorating for a small company; another creative outlet for me. The owner found out that I decorated cakes, and decided to add custom cakes to her offerings, and so I spent an entire summer creating and testing new designs and flavors until the time came for me to quit. Leaving this job was a turning point for me. I knew I could do a better job on my own. Thus a month after leaving the gift basket job, I had my own website up and was taking orders for custom cakes. Of course I did not do all this on my own: my husband, Tyler, is the entrepreneur, web designer and innovator behind our cake business. I would never be able to do this without his help. We make a good team – he on the engineering/marketing side, and me on the baking/creative side.
This was only the beginning. I operated out of my one-bedroom apartment in Boston for about 8 months until I graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2009. After graduating, my husband and I moved to Winthrop, where we were able to rent more space for our residential kitchen. We got so busy that we were pulling all-nighters to get all our cakes made. Lack of sleep (combined with a large stack of upcoming orders that I wouldn’t be able to do alone) led us to open our first storefront in Winthrop in April of 2010. In March of 2010 – in the middle of construction of our new store, as if that wasn’t enough to handle – my husband and I flew out to Denver to film the Food Network Challenge: Dora the Explorer Cakes. We were also filmed on TLC’s Fabulous Cakes – Boston Episode in 2011.
We always had dreams of moving our shop back to Boston and in 2013 the stars aligned and a retail location opened up near Symphony Hall in Boston, which is where we are now. Our amazing staff helped us build out and decorate our new store, several of whom are working with us 3 years later! Our staff in our new Boston store has grown a lot; tripling our bakers as well as adding baristas to work in our bakery cafe/coffee shop out front.
After moving to Boston our other TV appearances include: Food Network’s Duff Till Dawn and Outrageous Wedding Cakes both in 2015.”
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Helping customers and making cake is the easy part. The most difficult thing we dealt with was building and opening our new store in Boston. The unexpected challenges were dealing with all the red tape as part of getting licensed and passing all the inspections and meeting everyone’s requirements before we could open. That was very stressful getting all our vendors and contractors’ schedules to line up with ours and stay within our timeline was nearly impossible. We opened nearly two months behind schedule, which did cost us money. We were also on a super tight budget so we did a lot of the construction work ourselves. Our cake decorators were laying tile and painting and plastering walls. Which, funny enough, wall plaster and tile mud works a lot like our frosting so they took to that task quite well. Basically everything you see in our store is built, painted and created, by us and our staff.
Oakleaf Cakes Bake Shop – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
What we’re most known for is our over-the-top sculpted and artistically created cakes. All our decorators have art degrees so they each bring their own set of skills with them to the decorating table. Some are painters, some sculptors and ceramicists, all of which are skills that are easily translated into every cake we make. Everything that goes on our cakes (sugar flowers, animal figurines, even bride and grooms figurines) is hand sculpted out of edible materials: icing, fondant, sugar, etc. no plastic toys here!
In addition, our bakers all have culinary degrees and are solely responsible for making everything taste as good as it looks. We bake everything from scratch including our cake, our Italian Meringue Frosting (with real butter) and our Marshmallow Fondant (yes, it actually taste amazing!). We don’t say no to too many cakes, anything is possible with the right engineering and structure.
In addition to all our custom cakes, which is our claim to fame, we also have a bake shop/cafe our front. Where we have our cakes on display but customers can also come for a muffin, cookie, cupcake, cheesecake, coffee, tea etc. and hang out in our cafe. Everything in our bake shop is also baked onsite, from scratch, by real people. We’re not messing around. The majority of our baristas who work in the cafe are also artists and musicians, so as a whole our staff is all of the same artistic mindset which contributes to the product we put out and the whole atmosphere of the shop.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
It’s hard to pin point one event but a couple of our most proud cakes are: (on the ‘epic cakes’ page of our website) Our 6′ tall Stormtrooper cake, our 1,200 serving scale replica of Brown University, and our 5′ tall stack of sculpted instruments made for Keith Lockhart of the Boston Pops!
We are most proud of our staff. They help us get things done, week to week, and they stick around for years and are most responsible for the overall quality and atmosphere of our shop. We are a happy cake family and sometimes get along ‘too well’. 🙂 We enjoy creating your cake as much as you enjoy eating it!
Pricing:
- Custom cakes start from $150 and go up from there based on hours of decorating required for you design
- In our cafe we can make you a $3 latte or a $2 cookie or you can buy one of our buttercream cakes to go starting at $26
Contact Info:
- Address: 12 Westland Ave
Boston, MA 02115 - Website: oakleafcakes.com
- Phone: 617-299-1504
- Email: oakleafcakes@gmail.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/oakleafcakes
- Facebook: facebook.com/oakleafcakes
- Twitter: @oakleafcakes
- Other: blog.oakleafcakes.com
Image Credit:
Personal photo, cafe and store front – Studio Nouveau
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