Local Flavor

An elaborate anniversary cake incorporates fruit frosting with a virtual bouquet of flowers and leaves.

Cake. The modern slang for an easy task,  as in “piece o’ cake.” This cake isn’t easy. Even for an expert like Marilyn Feickert, who has been fascinated by frosting since she was 10 years old.

She recalls a gala party for her tenth birthday. Her family lived in North Dakota on a farm where life was so much simpler than it is here and now. Her father was a blacksmith and kids were more easily impressed back then, she thinks, as she remembers oohing and aahing over a cake with butter cream roses and carnations and lettering that read, “Happy Birthday Marilyn.” From that day, cake was her destiny. Her childhood “gang” of 20 little girlfriends would play wedding and she would always make the mud pie cake — in triple tiers with a mud slurry frosting and  topped with fresh daisies from her mother’s garden.  Handmade but not very edible.

When Marilyn and her husband Ron got married, his aunt Elvina made the cake — another source of icing inspiration — Marilyn’s first glimpse of pulled-sugar decorations.

Read the entire article in the February 2002 issue