79 Anderson St, Yarraville. Phone: 9314 6776
Kristen Alston has been baking cakes professionally for 20 years and running her cake shop, Baked, in Carlisle St, Balaclava, for six years.
Living locally, though, she is making sure some of her work life lives here, too.
What she calls her “cake studio” has been open on Anderson St for about three weeks.
While there are some of your more prosaic take-home-and-eat cakes on hand, it’s clear the spectacular display cakes that are arrayed around the Anderson St showroom are what will capture the attention and inspire the delight of children and also adults of all ages.
Is it food or is it art? Is it both? Does it matter?
Kristen tells me that her customers by and large do eat their cakes, but some do attempt to let them hang around for as long as possible.
That is about six or seven months.
The outer, colourful shells will last a lot longer, even if they do become inedible, but the bases – mudcake – eventually start shrinking and collapsing.
Despite the advent of TV programs such as Ace Of Cakes, Kristen remains happily unaware of and unconcerned about awards or other competitive or glamourous aspects of her art that may be out there.
“I live in a bit of a bubble,” she says.
Your typical substantial three-dimensional cake clocks in at about $300 and will feed 30 people.
The weirdest order she’s ever taken was from, ahem, members of a fetish club and involved intertwined penises.
I reckon it’s very hard to go past the Spongebob number.
This is the cake discussed in comments below:
We ordered our wedding cake from Cake Art Yarraville, a three tiered topsy turvy confection in red, silver and white. It was a complete success! Looked amazing, tasted fantastic and was just the combination of kookiness and classiness that we were after. Looking forward to ordering my next cake
c, glad it worked for you. Despite yours being the first comment on this post, a lot of people have been looking at it.
Horrible service, horrible cake, horrible decorations!!! If you want to be treated poorly, have a cake that falls apart and then be treated like fool to suggest it was your fault (oh and by the way pay 300 dollars for it) then by all means go to Cake Art Yarraville.
Sad to hear that. Have you taken it up with business concerned? Horrible decorations? But surely in this case you had a pretty good idea what you were getting into?
Happy to supply a picture of this ‘horrible cake’ with ‘horrible decorations’ before it left the shop. Maybe the transportation of the cake was the issue.. We are very approachable here at Cake Art and would have preferred to deal with this issue in a more graceful manner.
Christina has supplied us a photo of the cake in question – it’s the pink one at the bottom of the post above.
My wedding cake not only looked amazing but it tasted fantastic too! I can highly recommend Cake Art Yarraville.
I have been a long time customer of baked cakes and have always been extremely satisfied with the quality and taste of every item I have brought there from the chocolate eclairs and delightful opera slice to our families birthday cakes.
I’m sure there is more to the story than Alexandria is letting on in her review…you have to be very careful how you transport speciality cakes- I order all of mine from Baked & happily pay the small fee to get them personally delivered by the chef. I have had made an iPhone cake, Super Mario, camping tent – all superb. I also order fruit flans when going to a brunch & the gingerbread houses every Xmas for gifts. Highly recommended!!!!!!
I agree the cakes at Baked are fantastic (but a little out of my way in Balaclava). Thank goodness the Baked team opened up Cake Art in Yarraville. WOW what a display!