There has never been a cake design Stephanie Marciani has not embraced the challenge of making with open arms.
This endless challenge is one of the reasons she has such a passion for cake design and why she decided to start her businesses Pastry Steph after moving to Ponte Vedra Beach in 2015.
“I had a career before this in public relations and had just come to a moment where I thought to myself do I really want to keep doing this,” Marciani said. “I had always loved baking growing up and I remember making Christmas cookies with my aunts.”
She dove completely into making the career shift by enrolling in a nine-month program at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City in 2006, where she attended classes at night and worked during the day at Whole Foods in their bakery department and perfected what it takes on the production end of things.
During that time, she also met her future husband and the two ended up getting married and moving to Charlotte, where she worked for a custom cake shop called Edible Arts, which is where her passion for cakes really developed.
“I got used to everything being custom, and there were rarely two cakes that looked the same,” Marciani said. “I really liked that and the creative that you can have in the custom cake world.”
The family’s next stop was Nocatee, and Pastry Steph was born as way she could continue to design cakes while still being home and spending time with her two sons.
“It’s been great, and I have probably more than 300 clients that regularly reach out,” Marciani said.
Owning her own cake business is still a job that she pinches herself at times as she realizes how unique and fun of a career it is that she gets to do.
“When I was a kid growing up in Connecticut I would pretend to make food and that people would line up at the door of our basement and I would serve them, so the interaction with people is one of the things I’ve found out I enjoy the most,” Marciani said.
According to Marciani, there is no occasion that is off limits, as she has made cakes for both happy and sad occasions for people, such as birthdays and anniversaries to memorials.
However, she puts pride in every cake she makes, as she strives to make sure the design truly fits the occasion and is something the family or person receiving it can appreciate.
“It’s cool how much a cake can bring joy to a moment, and that is something I’m always thinking about when working on a design,” Marciani said.
A big part of making sure a cake design matches an occasion includes working closely with the party ordering it to make sure she and Marciani are on the same wavelength when it comes to what they hope the cake to look like.
For Marciani, because so many of her customers are regulars and also live in the Nocatee community, there is a certain relationship that she has developed with them the more orders they’ve placed, and it is something she does not take for granted.
“There’s really not many places where you can get a custom cake that is not made with a mix of some kind,” Marciani said. “Everything that I make is from scratch, and I think people appreciate that and want something distinctive that is special to their event.”
One thing she has realized from being in the cake decorating world is that trends and what people ask for is ever adapting.
As a result, she always tries to experiment and add new methods, the latest of which is glow-in-the-dark theme cakes, where there are certain powders that can be bought to help it glow.
“It’s just part of always challenging yourself and testing your creativity,” Marciani said.
For more details about hiring Pastry Steph for a future occasion go to the business’s Facebook and Instagram page.
