Players People on the Move - Charmaine Jones
Charmaine "Cakediva" Jones can make a cake that looks like just about anything you want, but you have to be careful what you ask for. Like the time Christopher Wallace Memorial Foundation requested a life-sized rendition of the Notorious B.I.G. for a fund-raising dinner. "It might be a culinary feat of art, but who wants to eat it? You'd have to take the kids out of the room when you cut it, " says Jones, who has made wedding cakes for soap operas such as All My Children and One Life to Live. The compromise? A cake shaped like a CDs with a likeness of Biggie made of candy on top. Jones is used to clients asking for the outrageous-after all, she didn't name her Hoboken, N.J.-based company Isn't That Special Outrageous Cakes for nothing. She started baking professionally in 1992 because she couldn't find cakes with an ethnic flavor, so to speak. Since then, she has wowed clients with elaborate confections such as a four-tiered cake incorporating a tank of live goldfish for the opening of the Atlantis hotel in Paradise Island, Bahamas. Her goal is to develop a line of prepackaged ingredients á la General Mills so that anyone can do it. "Everybody can be a cake diva," says Jones. "They just need to know how." Sure–piece of cake. — Carla E. Williams
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