Scaredy Cakes

Long before there was Martha, there was Gloria.

And Gloria begat Gloria’s Cake & Candy Supplies in Mar Vista, which begat untold numbers of well-decorated cakes and fabulously frosted cookies all over town.

Gloria Alvarez, the store’s founder, presides over the little retail outlet that some call a “hardware store for girls” (though she has plenty of male customers, too).

Amid the crowded shelves are more than 200 shapes of cookie cutters, caches of silver tips for piping icing, cake pans of every shape and cartoon character, and a kaleidoscope of sugar sprinkles.

“Where else could you find a giant pumpkin cookie cutter,” said Brigette Bonner, a 35-year-old mother of two small boys, who shopped with her. Bonner puts Gloria’s edible glitter on her children’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which she cuts into bat shapes with cookie cutters.

Alvarez, a native of Venice who declined to give her age, opened the store 27 years ago after she had trouble finding professional-quality cake-decorating supplies.

“I used to decorate cakes before I knew how to decorate cakes,” said Alvarez, whose employees are mostly family. “I started when I was 12 years old using candies. Then I took classes in cake decorating while raising my children and I just loved it.”

Since then, Alvarez’s store, a white bungalow house trimmed in royal blue, has emerged as a baker’s mecca: Each holiday requires a pilgrimage. Gloria’s loyal following includes high-achieving mom types, hotel chefs, catering companies, and food and set designers (who use her high-intensity food colorings like a painter’s palette).

Just now, however, Alvarez’s task is ghoulish. “Halloween is big for us,” she said, standing behind a refrigerated glass case of candied skulls, hissing black cats, skeletons, ghosts and witches. “We have been chasing all over town for black sugar sprinkles. We finally found some.”

Indeed. Bags of black bat sprinkles abound, as do bags of black jimmies, black nonpareils and several grades of black sugar sprinkles, jack-o’-lantern cake pans (which make 3-D pumpkin-shaped cakes), royal frosting eyes, candied R.I.P. gravestones and standard-issue orange nonpareils, glitter sugars and candied sprinkles. An

elaborate haunted gingerbread house is perched on a shelf, beckoning bakers to consider the possibilities.

There is baking gear that could only be described as high art (an atomizer for dusting flowers with iridescent powder, for instance), but the place is welcoming to the neophyte, too. Gloria’s offers “mini cookie-decorating classes” at the store, and Alvarez gives cake-decorating classes through the Culver City Parks and Recreation Department.

While Martha intimidates, Gloria soothes. When a baking-impaired customer confessed to producing a jack-o’-lantern cake that looked as if it had been in a car wreck, Alvarez sounded part plastic surgeon, part therapist: “Say for instance your jack-o’-lantern has a bad spot,” said Alvarez somberly. “You can put a spider on it, you can cover it with anything. We can help you with that confidence. Once you get control, you can do anything.”

Inspired, the customer began to eye something she’d never really considered before: the Y2K lollipop molds.

Gloria’s Cake & Candy Supplies is at 3755 Sawtelle Blvd., Mar Vista; (310) 391-4557. Web site: https://www.gloriascakecandysuplys.com.