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I practice law by day, but each night I shed my court clothes and enter the far gentler world of dessert making. My husband (the chef) and I own and operate a lovely little fine dining restaurant and, for eight years of nights and weekends, I've made all of the restaurant's desserts fruit sorbets, cheese cakes, biscotti, and (my favorite of all) layer cakes.

Cake decorating is, indeed, an art form. It is also a form of therapy. The sublime satisfaction of a perfectly turned-out layer cake is exceeded only by the reaction of others when the cake is seen and, finally, consumed.

My Aunt Lucy was a wonderful artist of some renown. She worked in oils, water colors, and other media. When I was a kid, she nurtured my artistic side, discussing color theory with me as she would with an adult. I loved her dearly. My mom made cakes for family celebrations and let me do the decorating. Years later, after my aunt passed away, we were all quite surprised to discover, in a large chest freezer in her basement, the decorated tops of many of those cakes, preserved like flowers pressed between the pages of a book.

They were all there. Mondrian cakes, their fields of colored coconut separated by strips of black licorice. The Pisa cake I baked to celebrate my aunt and uncle's return from an extended trip to Italy, its architectural details faithfully rendered in white icing. Cakes patterned after Miro, Kandinsky and, of course, Jackson Pollack.

My cakes are no longer sugar canvases for renderings of modern paintings. Their designs are now informed by other media, as I rehearse in ganache and buttercream the designs I use when I make glass beads the surface decorations, calligraphic swirls of acanthus leaves, raked designs and intricate patterns of dots.

Perhaps the best part of painting and sculpting on cakes is that the result is consumed, usually with great joy and murmurs of delight, and I get to do it all over again.

Learn more about this author, Barbara J. Cohan-Saavedra.
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