Cake: A Seven-Tier Masterpiece With Icing

Scre-e-eech!

The van driver jams on his brakes. A red light-leaping Porsche scorches across his bows.

Thump!

“Oh my God.”

Nothing has hit him outside. That thump came from the back. He groans. He knows what it is.

He edges across to the curb. Gets out. Goes round the back. Opens the doors.

“Oh no!”

It is just as he feared.

Seven out of 10 wedding cakes ruined.

The Saturday cake delivery man is devastated. Ten couples are waiting out there right now for their wedding cakes. What can he do?

He doesn’t even think of trying to un-goo them. He slams the doors shut, jumps in the front and races to the one man in the galaxy who can save him.

Jesus Pinto, cake-icer extraordinare, fastest buttercream rose-twiddler in the West, faces every crisis with the fatalism of Mexico and the unflappability of a Churchill. He stands listening to the sorry tale in front of the only rubbish bin in all San Diego that you long to lick. Its lip is ringed with gooey rainbow-colored sweet slops.

Pinto expects Saturdays in spring to be hectic. These weekends he’s icing and decorating up to 70 cakes, some five-tiered, some with flowers in them, some with fountains in them, all with millions of twiddles, borders, icing strings and hand-made roses. As deadlines approach and the Chula Vista kitchen of Standlee’s Funtastic Cake and Party Shop echoes with orders, requests, pleadings, Pinto carries on, quiet and devastatingly fast, the eye of the hurricane, as productive as he is calm.

In 30 torturously long minutes, he has all seven repaired.

“Here,” he says to the driver, “use some more of this.” He hands him some plastic foam mats to stop the cakes from sliding in the van. “And don’t hurry.”

Sallie Scardina and Andy Tutino’s seven-tier cake was not among that lot. Pinto works at it now, with a few hours to go, along with a dozen others.

So here it is, the $800 all-white No. 19A in Standlee’s catalogue. Baker’s code: 3/14.14-FF-12-9-6, which means there are three 14-inch cakes on the bottom with one central 14-incher straddling them, topped by pillars and fresh flowers, topped by a 12-incher, a 9-incher and a 6-incher--the one they’ll probably keep for themselves to bring out next year--on top.

The cake itself has been out five days, left to mature to its ideal condition. It will take Pinto four to five hours to turn the seven slabs of silver-white cake into the glitzy rococo tower of bells and roses climbing up from the table on Standlee’s patented disposable cardboard pillars.

Everybody at Standlee’s says the place wouldn’t function without Pinto. In this season, their wedding output depends on his quickness and his artistic flair.

He has been in the business long enough, too--all his life. He was born in Tijuana in ‘43, where his father owned a bakery. He started helping him out there, and was put on to making birthday cakes. He met Standlee McMain 18 years ago on a trip over the border to pick up supplies like sugar and flavorings. Then in ‘74, he opened up his own cake shop in Tijuana. But McMain finally lured him across the border four years ago and made him his chief decorator.

Pinto is coming to the end of Sallie and Andy’s cake. He gently plunges Standlee’s patented disposable cardboard pillars through the middle 14-incher, then gives them their final cream finials and disguising swans.

“The old man used to say, ‘If you can’t eat, it I don’t want to decorate with it’. The actual columns are the only things you can’t eat.”