When Katherine Guerin was in fifth grade, she started baking for her stuffed animals. Now, her hobby is a part-time job.

Near the end of her freshman year of high school, Guerin had baked a tray of cupcakes for one of her father’s hunting safety courses. After she passed them out, a couple participating in the course approached Guerin and asked if she could make them a wedding cake.

Guerin, an undeclared freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, first learned the art of baking at an A.C. Moore cake decorating class she took with her mother during fifth grade. The couple from the hunting safety course placed a tall order — Guerin was required to bake a six-tier wedding cake with each tier being two layers with strawberry jam in the middle.

“I couldn’t have turned it down,” Guerin said. “It’s really fun to kind of challenge myself and push myself to see what I can do. It was super hard to configure without the jam oozing out the side, but it came out absolutely beautiful.”

Guerin centers her business around cakes because her largest orders are wedding cakes. Wedding cakes, she said, are extremely high-pressure orders because of all the people that will see it and the expectation for it to be absolutely perfect.

“I always have this anxiety of ‘What if the customer doesn’t like it?’” Guerin said. “It’s something that’s always in the back of my head. But usually they turn out beautiful and everyone loves them.”

For now, Guerin is taking orders on the side as she works on her classwork toward her degree. After college, she plans on expanding her business into a public storefront and said she finds enjoyment in the process of baking.

“When you’re in the kitchen putting a cake together and you don’t know what will come of it, but in the end, something beautiful comes out of it,” Guerin said. “It feels like a work of art —I’m the artist.”

Published on February 23, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact Momin: mrafi@syr.edu