🎄 Holiday Treats Taking Over at the Cake Shop! 🍰

The Thanksgiving turkey is half gone and it’s being used for either sandwiches a gumbo. It must mean the Christmas season is officially upon us.

Amy Holsomback, who lives outside Hessmer but gets placed in Bunkie addresses, is preparing a holiday menu that her specialty cake shop is offering.

“Usually during the Christmas season, people are short on cash and the items they usually want are decorated cookies, pies, petit fours and cupcakes,” she said.

When cake pops were mentioned, Amy said that they aren’t popular as much as before. “You have to learn to spot the trends,” she remarked, and it seems cake pops have left the mainstream, although Amy still offers them.

A specialty item Amy bakes during Christmas is the ever-popular chantilly cake. “They’re really popular at Easter but during Christmas people will also order them.”

Amy’s journey from “never, ever made a cake” to her own specialty cake shop is more than remarkable. It all started about 16 years ago when the cake her sister ordered for a baby shower was less than what she ordered, much less.

With her mom, Theresa Murphy and another sister, Laura O’Neal, the three hit the kitchen at 3 a.m. after Amy got off work from the casino, where she worked as a dealer.

“We stayed up all night and when we finished I thought, ‘we did this, we threw this together in a few hours, oh wow!’”

And in her own words, making cakes, “went on from there.”

Amy backtracked and described her mother as the type of person who can do anything, she can figure it out and she’s very artsy. “I inherited that from her.”

That quality easily transferred into making cakes and specialty items.

“I took no formal classes but I did watch YouTube and bought a book, “Professional Baking,” which is a textbook on baking. I learned so much from that,” she said.

“Baking is a science and the book brought that out.” In cooking, you can do a pinch of this and a pinch of that, but baking requires exact measurement.

That’s why Amy uses a scale and weighs her ingredients. “A cup of flour can get packed and then the baked good becomes dry.”

Learning cake baking was a joy for Amy, who recounted how she dropped out of school as a high school freshman. For Amy, school was not a joy.

“I struggled for so long in school and thought I was stupid. I’d ask myself, ‘What’s wrong with me, everyone else gets it?’”

It wasn’t until she was in beauty school with her sister that Amy learned she was dyslexic. And it was her sister who discovered it.

“We’d study together for the tests and she’d get an A and I’d get a C. I knew the information, I understood, I just processed it differently.”

After she realized there was a name to what she had been going through in school, Amy felt a relief and it freed her to move forward. Her success in the world of specialty cakes, and she does emphasize “specialty,” is never taken for granted.

“I have to triple check my math in a recipe and have learned to recognize where my pitfalls are.”

Amy always checks her spelling more than once on personalized baked goods. “It’s an everyday thing and I don’t use the dyslexia as a crutch.”

To say that her hard work has paid off is a given if you take a look at her website, cakemeaway.com.

An average cake making weekend for Amy can be 7-12 cakes, including wedding cakes.

“Last weekend I made three wedding cakes, one groom’s cake, three specialty cakes and five dozen cupcakes.”

“The tallest wedding cake I’ve made was 6-tiers and I needed a step ladder to decorate it.”

Speaking of decorating the cakes, Amy said it’s the part she likes the most because it challenges that artsy, creative gene from her mother.

Amy, whose head is full of so much baking knowledge, gave me a tip on making icing.

“Icing needs salt,” she said, “without it, the icing is just not as tasty.”

Her clean, well-organized bake shop sits behind her home and that’s where the sweet magic happens.

Ironically, Amy who has been working alone for all these years has made a decision. The baby for whom the shower was 16 years ago, Amy’s great-niece, will soon be working at the shop.

Her niece would never have seen the first cake that was replaced but she will get to see firsthand how Amy’s specialty cakes take on their shine and sparkle.