25 years later, Celebrity Cake Studio still decorating the heck out of every occasion

Odette D’Aniello was shorter than a counter when she first learned to decorate cakes at her uncle’s bakery in Guam. Years later, in her early 20s, she was driving to Tacoma to pick up her younger sister, Mary Ann Quitugua, and noticed a sign for a trade show that would change their lives.

“I was just new here, driving on the freeway and I was like, ‘What is a wedding show?’” recalled D’Aniello, co-owner of Celebrity Cake Studio, which just celebrated its 25th anniversary.

At the Tacoma Dome, she discovered a throng of people who “just made wedding cakes.”

“I can’t believe they charge that much, and they do it out of their garage?”

It was 2000, and the year prior, she and her family had opened a cafe in Lacey called Celebrity Bakery and Cafe. They sold build-your-own sandwiches on freshly baked bread for around $5. “It didn’t work, because cafes don’t make money, so that was a bad idea,” joked D’Aniello.

After consulting with a man named John Buckles, who ran the Tacoma Wedding Show and others in the area, she decided to rent a booth.

Almost overnight, they scrapped the cafe idea and became a cake studio. They bought a delivery van at an auction for $800. It was gray with “red fluffy carpet inside the entire thing, including the ceiling,” D’Aniello mused. They called it The Lovebug and it served them well for around four years before they upgraded to a minivan.

Around the same time, she and her husband David, a schoolteacher from Connecticut whom she met in Guam, had their first child. Now, their daughter Milana is 24 and the marketing director of the family company that not only makes hundreds of wedding cakes, anniversary cakes and more every year but also ships out thousands of petit-fours through their Dragonfly Cakes brand, which they purchased in 2017.

“We were doing cakes before the Cake Boss,” said D’Aniello in October, a few days after the shop’s official anniversary celebration. “We grew up decorating cakes.”

She was born in the Philippines, where her mother’s grand-uncle opened a bakery after World War II, she explained. After her mother married, she made extra money selling cakes. Eventually, the uncle moved to Guam and the family followed. The kids worked in the bakery, too.

D’Aniello remembers slicing bread, but she knew the cake room had air-conditioning: “I taught myself, and I became a really good cake decorator.”

She attended the University of Arizona, her first time flying or landing on mainland soil, but returned to Guam to teach, which helped pay off her student loans. Eventually, the family moved to Washington.

In 2004, their refreshed approach off-and-running in Lacey, D’Aniello and her sister bought another cake business that worked out of Tacoma’s Freighthouse Square. She was just about to have her son, who will turn 21 in January. “That’s how long we’ve been in Tacoma,” she said.

Quitugua joined full-time, and they operated Celebrity Cake Studio at Freighthouse Square until 2012, when they moved to their current location at 314 E. 26th St.

CAKE DECORATING IN THE FAMILY

On a recent Tuesday morning, their staff of around 30 were all sporting new lavender T-shirts with a cute “25” cake on the back. The downstairs retail space offers ready-to-buy cupcakes, and rectangles of four-layered cake in flavors like German chocolate, coconut cream, cappuccino mousse and red velvet. A fridge holds boxes of orders awaiting pickup, and another room showcasing tiered creations allows for the studio’s bread-and-butter: concepting custom cakes with customers.

Up a short set of stairs, which one might not even realize was there from the modest building exterior, is where the magic happens.

It’s more than a simple bakery. It’s a top-to-bottom operation that’s big by local-bakery standards but small in the big-player world that is the commercial baking industry.

Every cake is “hand-made and hand-decorated,” said Milana, from the four-layer cakes to the petit-fours, each barely an inch square. Those little numbers are now cut in a fancy wet-jet slicing machine, after which an employee trims the large rectangle and preps the squares for glazing and decorating.

The most coveted space is the decorating room, which is unusually cold to ensure the integrity of the buttercream, ganache, sprinkles and other accoutrements. Just last week, this cohort of about five young women — a mix of self-taught and pastry-school-trained — decorated 100 cakes. On a Tuesday morning in October, one was busy tending to a round intended to resemble a bookshelf. Another was conjuring the wavy blue hues of the ocean.

Even if the idea seems out there, or it would be a first, said Milana, “We have so much skill, we can figure out how to do it. It’s fun to watch them figure out how to do a really complicated cake.”

They reminisced about a request for a drum kit, fashioning cake into a cymbal and turning a round sideways for the bass, and a Hawaiian-themed cake in which Odette actually scooped out a place for a real-water pond.

CAKES FOR ALL OCCASIONS

These days, the elder D’Aniello won’t be found here, but she showed off the skills she learned decades ago in Guam. In about 15 minutes, she decorated a small cake using the traditional Lambeth technique, a Victorian-era aesthetic that was popularized in the 1930s. It was a key feature of the Wilton style, the famous cake-decorating supply and design company, but it succumbed to minimalist trends and flavorless fondant. Intriguingly, noted Milana, the old-fashioned look is back thanks coincidentally to TikTok.

Celebrity Cake Studio is happy to oblige.

Trends have come and gone in the bakery’s 25 years: “sugar-free, gluten-free — we’d just keep going in the same direction,” said D’Aniello. “We can’t go where the tide goes. Maybe we would’ve been better off listening to that, but we didn’t, and we’re still here, so maybe that was a good thing too.”

They have turned down requests to participate in competitive shows, she said, in part because at the beginning and end of every day, she and her sister had kids to raise.

“I don’t want to be notorious. I just want my kids to grow up happy and healthy, and have a business that I can be proud of. I think my family is happy, and my team is happy. It was just this very simple goal,” she continued. “To have a means to create something beautiful that people actually love and remember? It really is quite fun. It’s better than many things. It’s a very honest way of making a living.”

CELEBRITY CAKE STUDIO

▪ 314 E. 26th St., Tacoma, 253-627-4773, celebritycakestudio.com

▪ Hours: Monday-Saturday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

▪ Details: Tacoma bakery specializing in custom cakes turns 25; pre-designed options available with 1-3 days lead time, plus individual items to purchase in-store daily

DRAGONFLY CAKES

▪ Petit-fours available at Celebrity Cake Studio and at select stores including Met Market, Whole Foods, PCC Markets and Uwajimaya Asian Market

This story was originally published October 22, 2024 at 5:00 AM.