“An artist with a pencil erases . . . an artist working with icing just eats the mistake . . .”
— Diane Fisher White
From a pink-and-white cottage in Laurel called Kake Korner, “Diane the Cake Lady” bakes confections in the shape of cognac bottles, expensive handbags, skateboard parks sporting skulls and crossbones, Hummer road hogs and Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
“If I can get a good look at something, I can draw it,” said White, who has no need for molded pans or a cake cheaters contraption called the “copy cake,” a kind of overhead projector that beams an image onto a cake for tracing.
White, 48, grew up in Linthicum and graduated from St. Philip Neri grade school. She began working in the catering industry while an adolescent and had the idea of becoming a dietitian while attending Archbishop Keough High School before it merged with Seton.
Then she became a mother — one of those life lessons that aren’t on your list of things to do — and had to figure out how to make ends meet.
“When I was 18, I saw a relative who was my age make a clown cake,” said White, who also sells her cakes from a kiosk at the Clarksville Flower & Gift Shop on Route 108 in Howard County.
“I thought I could make some extra money baking cakes … there were times when I was a single mom with two girls and four jobs and I was still baking cakes and selling them out of the house to friends and neighbors and relatives.”
Of all the goodies that White makes — be they shaped in a cathedral or a simple cupcake — it is her icing, developed through several years of trial and error, for which she is celebrated.
“I’ve probably had a hundred cupcakes in my life, you grow up having an idea in your mind of what a cupcake is,” said Jason Meyerson, an Ellicott City chiropractor who cracks White’s back when she is not cracking eggs.
“But then you eat one of Diane’s and it’s like, Wow! It renews your interest in something mundane like a cupcake — makes you remember why you liked them in the first place.”
Good, yes, says White, with pride — very good. But not cheap.
“We charge $39 for a quarter sheet cake compared to [about] $21 at Giant or $16 at Sam’s Club,” she said. “But at those places you’re getting frozen cakes with bucket icing. With us, you’re paying for [ingredients] and art work.”
With all of her sweet success, however, White remains a searcher and isn’t so sure that driving around the beltway in a pink-and-white Kake Korner delivery car filled with delectables is her true calling.
“I’m still having fun, and I don’t mind working hard,” she said. “But I’m not sure this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I only know that this is what I’m doing now.”
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected]
