It’s great to recognise cake icons in the industry for their expertise and phenomenal designs. This month, we speak to Marina Sousa.
Marina Sousa has been creating beautiful celebration and wedding cakes for 20 years and has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Food Network with her incredible designs!
Can you tell us a little bit about your cake decorating journey – where did it all begin?
I began decorating cakes in a cake studio in Beverly Hills almost 20 years ago. I was living in Southern California working in the entertainment industry like just about everyone else there. I left a job in entertainment advertising and between jobs, I walked by a cake shop in Beverly Hills; as they say, the rest is history. Rosebud Cakes was doing then what is very common now in cake design. It was an edible art studio and given my background in fashion, theatre and event production, I was fascinated and had truly never seen anything like it. There were so many transferable skills just with different, in this case edible, mediums. In a very short time, I was working full time as a cake designer. Less than two years after starting at Rosebud Cakes, I really wanted to open my own business. I knew enough to know there was so much I didn’t know in regard to baking. Because I started my career as a designer, I didn’t have any real baking experience. So I decided to go back to school and attended the Culinary Institute of America and completed their Baking and Pastry Arts program. I started Just Cake a few months after graduating.
How did you go from working in visual merchandising and the entertainment industry to creating impressively beautiful wedding cakes? Was it a hard transition?
Although it seems like an unlikely path, it really wasn’t a hard transition. My varied experiences really dovetailed one into the other and allowed me to view the process from a couple of different perspectives. I think that has truly benefitted me over the years.
How long have you been in the cake decorating industry?
I believe I am approaching 20 years. Yikes!