Fernanda Abarca has worked as a surfacer at DreamWorks Animation for nearly 12 years, but her creative process isn’t finished when she leaves work for the day. That’s when she heads home to work on her latest projects for the cake decorating company she runs with her husband, Issac Abarca, a media coordinator at Disney.
“We really try hard to depict the likeness of the character and stay true to who the character is, because of that, and because of our time constraints, we just stick to a few orders a month.”
While now they have a stable of mainly marketing and public relations clients at studios all over town, the first cake Abarca made was for her daughter’s 4th birthday.
“I started playing with sugar paste and had a lot of fun with it,” she says. “It was a lot like Sculpey [clay], but edible, so I started making cakes for their birthday parties, and from there just got hooked.”
When her daughter’s birthday cake was a success, she asked a DreamWorks event coordinator if she could try her hand at making something to celebrate the opening of Rise of the Guardians—and now DreamWorks is one of her biggest clients.
Holding down a full-time job and working on cakes in her off-time means there’s a lot to do and just 24 hours in each day. Abarca and her husband have their workflow down to a science: He handles the architecture of each design—the rigs and other structural details, along with the actual baking—while she works on the sugar sculpting.
“[The heads] take the longest to sculpt,” she says. “I’ll make the head out of chocolate or Rice Krispies Treats so I can take my time sculpting it. Once the head is in then I’ll put in the rest of the body as cake a day before the event.”
The precision required in her day job leads her to create more than just a beautiful cake; instead her artistry appears to transport characters directly off the screen and into her confectionary creations.
“We really try hard to depict the likeness of the character and stay true to who the character is,” she says. “Because of that, and because of our time constraints, we just stick to a few orders a month. This is why we can’t really do birthday parties—we just don’t have the time.”
Those orders include giant cakes to celebrate openings, but sometimes they’re large quantities of cupcakes to send as gifts to the Hollywood Foreign Press or other individuals studios want to schmooze.
“Most of the work I do is large cakes, but then I get these really intricate little cupcakes and gifts,” she says. “Those are fun, too, but it’s a completely different way of working because you become kind of like a manufacturer, because you’re working on, like, 100 Poppy heads [from Trolls]. It’s really excruciating, but they are so cute at the very end, and they’re all edible.”
Sugar sculpting offers Abarca a different creative outlet than the one she gets at her day job. “I’m a surfacing artist, so I’m constantly painting and working on these characters, and their hair, and stuff like that, but there’s something different about physically sitting down and sculpting something with your hands versus a computer,” she says. “There’s something satisfying about it, and it’s just very peaceful.”
Abarca’s daughter is now 11 and her son is 9, and the kids help out the business however they can—while they aren’t in the kitchen yet, they earn pocket money folding boxes and doing other easy work. But even they don’t always get custom birthday cakes anymore.
“Everybody always asks, ‘They must get the coolest cake,’ but really the poor things usually get not-very-cool cakes. By the time their birthday runs around and it’s like, ‘Do I really have to make another cake?’ They’re so cute, because most of the time they’ll say stuff like, ‘No, mommy. You don’t have to sculpt that. I can just put a toy on top of it.’”
Want to see more of Abarca’s creative confections? Visit her at facebook.com/FernandaAbarcaCakes/ or follow her on Instagram @fernandaacakes.
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