Ed Hughes works a ball of red fondant that will be used to cover a Corvette cake at Edible Dreams Custom Cake Shop and Bakery in Naugatuck.
By Jenna Gaillard, Staff Writer
Ed Hughes pauses, looks up from the half-complete, edible sculpture in front of him and studies the photograph on his laptop screen. His muse is a classic Corvette. And as he carves the car’s features with a special tool, the Corvette’s body parts begin to take shape.
Hughes is the owner of Edible Dreams Custom Cake Shop and Bakery in Naugatuck, which provides customers with some of the most unique and detail-oriented cakes in the area.
Continuing his family’s tradition of baking cakes, Hughes decided in December 2007 to start his own business and chose the Spring Street location, formerly occupied by Rita’s Bakery.
“I just started doing this as a hobby, and it turned into this whole bakery…” Hughes said. “I figured I’d take a chance.”
Hughes said he came up with the name Edible Dreams when he was writing an e-mail to a customer who asked what made him decide to enter his line of work.
“I wrote back it wasn’t about the money, it was about making people’s dreams edible,” Hughes said. “And then it just came out that way, Edible Dreams, out of conversation. Plus it’s the initials of my name, so I just went with it.”
The Edible Dreams team consists of Hughes and Andrea Wiggins. Both bake cakes and other pastries and decorate them in great detail. Hughes said he advertised his business on the social networking Web site MySpace, and that’s where he met Wiggins.
Hughes said Wiggins does most of the baking and once the layers are out of the oven, he stacks them in what he calls “a square block of cake.” He then starts carving the cake into one of his creations.
Edible Dreams sells a wide variety of pastries, including pies, cookies, danishes, breads and cupcakes. According to the bakery’s Web site, Edible Dreams specializes in wedding cakes, birthday cakes and civil union cakes. But Hughes said his favorite cakes to make are custom car or truck cakes.
“Anything with a challenge,” Hughes said. “Anything that’s difficult, that takes planning and engineering. The harder it is the more fun it is.”
Hughes said he has had some unusual requests: toilets, wrestling rings, even female torsos.
“People ask for some strange cakes,” Hughes said.
He said most people provide specific directions but others give him a theme and “let me go with it.”
Hughes has a well-developed routine when making custom cakes. Last Friday, he was making a small Corvette cake that needed to feed 30 to 40 people.
“I stacked [the cake], filled it and started to shave away at what it should look like,” Hughes said.
Throughout the decorating process, Hughes looked back and forth at pictures of Corvettes — each from a different angle — which he uses as guidelines when molding the cake.
Other times Hughes can “do it by eye.”
“…Some of the cakes I don’t even look at a picture because I have a picture of it in my head…” he said. “I just have the gift that I can recreate it without looking at it.”
According to Hughes, wedding cakes actually take less time to make than custom car or truck cakes because — however elegant — they are less complex.
“It’s not like an engineering process where a lot of times [with the car cakes] I have to stack the cake, and then cut the cake, shape the cake and then mold the fenders or any kind of body part the cars are known for,” Hughes said.
Hughes said most of the wedding cakes he makes take five to six hours, and some take even less. He said car cakes typically require 10 or 11 hours, from start to finish. Sometimes the decorating process alone lasts eight hours.
A few weeks ago, one of Hughes’ wedding cakes won first place in a competition. He made the cake in his bakery and presented it to judges for evaluation.
Even more testing was a recent live cake challenge in front of an audience. Five contestants, each with one assistant, had 3 ½ hours to create a cake, based on the theme “wonders of the world.” Contestants could choose man-made or natural wonders.
According to Hughes, the other contestants stuck to one wonder each, while he took on nine different subjects, including the Statue of Liberty, Easter Island sculptures and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Hughes said the live competition was “a little nerve-racking” at first, but he got used to it and won a silver medal. He plans to enter more competitions in the future.
Hughes said cake requests are a bit low at the moment, but he hopes to have about 30 orders per week during the summer because it will be wedding season.
According to Hughes, the price of a cake depends on the “complexity of the cake and how many people you need to feed.” He said custom cakes cost at least $125 “due to the time that’s involved with the decorating process.”
Edible Dreams Custom Cake Shop and Bakery is located at 51 Spring Street in Naugatuck. For more information, visit the bakery’s Web site at http://www.edibledreamscakes.com or call the bakery at 729-0662.
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