Sugar rush: running a cake shop in Brandon

Courtney Jacobson runs a home business baking with her mother.

The two locals work together full-time in a kitchen south of Brandon. On a slow day, eight cakes, and 600 sugar cookies will need to be finished. But when the wedding and Christmas seasons come around, business picks up and may require 3,500 cupcakes and almost 100 cakes, among other things, in a week.

The pace keeps things exciting, Jacobson told the Sun in a recent interview. You never really know what to expect in the business of cake making, she said: sometimes orders come in all at once and the day is jam packed, and other days it’s slow.

“We absolutely love it because every day is different,” Jacobson said from her kitchen.

Baking a cake is always different depending on the flavours, shape, size and budget, she said. Variety inherent to this work is a big plus for her, and the main draw is that custom baking requires unique problem solving.

“I can be more creative this way,” Jacobson said while spinning a cake on a rotating stand, lathering it with icing. “Every cake is so custom, so everything varies.”

“Lots of moms and dads will send you ideas, and then they will tell you to put your spin on things.”

The baker described that this fall, she baked a 3D model cake that resembled the building from a cartoon called Futurama. The instructions were merely to “make sure the rocket is there,” she said, and the rest was up to her to solve.

The biggest cake she has baked — thus far — was lifted by six men, and was designed for an oil rig, shaped like the company’s building, she said.

The Brandon local discovered her bent for cooking growing up. Jacobson’s mother told the Sun that the obsession with cooking took hold in high school, when Jacobson studied a course on food services at Crocus Plains Secondary School.

“She always liked to mess around with things at home, but when she got into high school that was a whole different ball game,” her mother, Dianne Oliver, said.

The two worked together when Jacobson was a girl on their family farm, helping to cook for a team of farmers. Oliver said she encouraged Jacobson to take a course at the Brandon school — and that was the turning point.

The experience in the high school cafeteria paved the way for a life-time career. Jacobson went to Red River College to get her red seal, and later started baking part-time on the side, while working with her father delivering milk in the 2000s. Jacobson spent years working that way until she opened her first bake shop on 18th Street in 2013.

In 2019, she moved into a storefront-kitchen shop built at her home south of Brandon, where she now works with her mother full-time.

Oliver said she supports the work full-time in the kitchen because she enjoys it, and she’s glad to see continuity in her family.

“My mother was a great baker and I used to watch her all the time,” Oliver said. “And it’s not that often that you get to work with a son or daughter, and we get along very well.”

The Mario-themed-cakes, car model cakes, and TV-show-themed cakes — all the modern creations come as pleasant surprise to Oliver.

“I love watching all the stuff she creates. That’s my favourite part about it,” she said. “When I did it, and my mother did it, there was no such things. So it’s great to see.”

In late November, Jacobson worked on a cowboy-themed cake for a child’s first birthday. The cake was coloured brown and adorned with a cowboy hat and a boot, and yet to see a “this is my first rodeo” sign created for the top.

The most common custom cake order is a birthday cake, and weddings are also very common, Jacobson said.

The trends in custom cakes are constantly evolving, and so the necessary skills change too, Jacobson said. She described keeping up with new themes, such as cakes that appear to bleed when cut.

It can sometimes be hard to put the work down, especially since it’s on her home property, she said.

“I’m a bad workaholic. I won’t lie to you,” she said. “I’d be here seven days a week easily (if I didn’t force myself to step away.)”

Looking ahead, Jacobson said she is working on a food truck to work on a mobile basis in Brandon. She said that she would use this to attend fairs and events.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com