CRESTLINE — Pam Sand is using her artistic talent to create a different kind of artwork. But cakes are her canvasses.
Sand is the owner of Sweet Originals, a cake business which she runs out of her North Columbus Street home. But customers and Crestliners alike prefer to call her “Pam-E-Cakes.”
“They are like works of art for me,” said Sand, a 1985 graduate of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. “It’s fun to see what they turn out to be. I’ll draw out the design of what I’m thinking first and then I’ll think afterwards that sure turned out cute.”
Sand doesn’t just bake ordinary sheet cakes. Her custom creations for weddings, birthdays, anniversaries and other special occasions are multi-tiered or three-dimensional, draped in colorful fondant, decorated with remarkable detail and definitely realistic.
She has made a Singer sewing machine, a teapot with matching tea cups and a basketball shoe complete with the box it goes in. There’s been a designer handbag, a barbecue grill for a 40th birthday and most recently a red poinsettia that looks like it should be in a flower shop instead.
“Doing cakes allows me to be really creative,” Sand said. “Once I started I realized I enjoyed making things out of fondant. Structural things are probably the hardest part with cakes, making sure nothing’s going to fall over and that kind of thing.”
Sand, a native of Galion, was working at Tridico Silk Screening in Mansfield when she decided to take a Wilton cake decorating class. She learned sugar flower techniques at Maria’s Cakes in Mansfield, where she also helped out when her shift ended at Tridico’s.
In 1990, her cake business was born. But what started out as a handful of birthday cake orders a month soon snowballed into a cupcake line and 10 flavors of elaborate all-occasion cakes, all covered in rich buttercream frosting and decorated with flowers and fancy fondant icing.
Sand invested in a professional grade Kitchen-Aid mixer to accommodate her growing side-line and ordered a variety of cake pans and hundreds of metal frosting tips and flower molds and cutters. Six years ago, she built an addition to her kitchen.
Sugar flowers have become her specialty. Sand handcrafts roses, peonies and a variety of flowers from gum paste, then dusts on the colors. A thin wire supports each fragile piece, which is painstakingly layered petal by petal until it’s finally formed.
“Every flower has its own technique of how you do it to make it look real,” she explained, holding up a container of flowers that had already dried. “I guess that’s why I like to do them, to make them look real. It’s also very relaxing to me.”
She’s also a pro at rolling out colorful fondant, which she uses to cover and decorate her cakes. Plastic cutters make the basic fondant shapes, while a ball modeling tool allows her to thin out the edges of flower petals and perfect other intricate designs.
“I think going to art school really helped me out,” said Sand, who now works full-time in the art department at Anthony Lee Screen Printing in Crestline. “I’m making the objects out of fondant, but it’s actually similar to working with modeling clay.”
Sand has hosted cake decorating classes for interested members of her church, Wesley Chapel in Galion, with proceeds to benefit the church’s building or mission funds. Her mother, Margaret Sand, has helped with the baking since the onset.
“I like it all, but I really enjoy making things, like the little Elmo’s or the barnyard animals on a farm cake,” she said. “When the parents pick up the birthday cakes and their child comes in with them and then smiles, it’s just so gratifying to see that joy from them.”
