Over the past week, Elizabeth Marek has been overwhelmed with phone calls and emails from news media about something she made that became an internet sensation: a quirky, elaborate cake.

Marek works full time out of her modest home kitchen in Beaverton, Oregon, where she sculpts elaborate figures from fondant and construction chocolate with her happy toddler underfoot. The cake that caught the world’s attention had a very Pacific Northwestern flavour.

From the outside it looked for all the world like a stump with an axe embedded in it. Better yet, its spongy interior was plaid, a feat that required intricate geometrical layering of three different coloured cakes.

Lumberjack cake. Photograph: Sugar Geek Show/The Guardian

In the past year, Marek has moved definitively from baking cakes to teaching others how to decorate with online videos and in-person workshops. Marek and her web-designer husband, Dan, were planning a gradual transition to a new website that collects all of her tutorials about decorative and novelty cake-making. That all changed when the video caught on.

“In days the Sugar Geek Show Facebook page went from 400 likes to over 12,000,” Marek said. “We got 1,000 sign-ups from the website from people who would have never heard of me.”



Once photos of it were posted to her website, the cake caught the imagination of sites from Mashable to the Huffington Post and local television.



Marek says she has “lost count” of all of the direct media inquiries she’s fielded in the past week.

Soon it was in every corner of the internet. On Wednesday she laughingly said that, “Last night my husband told me, ‘Your cake is on Reddit!’”

Lumberjack cake. Photograph: Sugar Geek Show/The Guardian

As a full-time pastry professional with a strong internet presence, Marek has had big spikes of interest in other creations from her peer group in the “cake community”. A zombie-themed effort suddenly and inexplicably drew traffic a year after it was made. A burrito-shaped novelty got a lot of attention, almost all of it local.

But the “lumberjack cake” has been a real watershed. “This is the first cake I’ve made that was shared by people who don’t care about cake.”

So why this one? She wonders if it stood out because so many cakes appeal to a stereotypically feminine sensibility. “It’s a manly cake. I didn’t realise there was such a lack of cakes for men. It didn’t occur to me before but most cakes are aimed at women.”

Marek came to cake-making circuitously. As a child, her father, a botanist, trained her to see the beauty in nature and supported her creative streak. “Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, I always had art supplies.”

Her creativity led her to design school, but she found working as a graphic designer unrewarding. She blew off steam watching the Food Network. On cake-decorating shows, she saw a hobby that would satisfy her creative urges. She started making sculpted cakes for friends. One day a stranger asked her how much she would charge for a custom cake. She didn’t know, but it got her thinking, “Could I charge for cakes? Would people buy them?”

Elizabeth Marek. Photograph: Jason Wilson/The Guardian

After her husband made her a website, the orders came flooding in and never stopped. She quit her job but soon found herself so busy running a baking business that “I was never making any cakes. They were all made by my interns, and I suddenly realised I had become an office person.”

Now she conducts cake-making workshops all over the United States and overseas. The viral attention helps, but the slow and steady building of reputation and an online brand is what pays the bills.

“Beginners think that one cake is going to make your whole career. Next month no one will care about the plaid cake. People get over stuff really fast.”

Other small businesses have had products go viral in a way that changes the game for them – think about the cronut or the three wolf moon T shirt – but it’s seemingly impossible to predict which products will attain a sudden mass appeal, particularly with limited resources for market research or advertising.

Marek doesn’t claim any power to predict what will take off and urges those who come to her for advice to simply pursue the course that makes them happy.



“You don’t really ever know what will resonate with people,” she says.