Teen takes the cake and first place at national decorating contest
When it comes to decorating cakes, 14-year-old Natalie New is not that fast.
But she is spectacular.
Take the floral bouquet cake the Overland Park, Kan., teen made two years ago. The top decoration consisted of 58 finely detailed multicolored roses made of gum paste that had the look of fine porcelain. Every flower had 17 petals, individually sculpted, then meticulously hand-painted and assembled. The process took a knee-weakening 61 hours.
That attention to detail helped Natalie capture first place last fall in the prestigious Oklahoma State Sugar Art Show and Grand National Wedding Cake competition in Tulsa, Okla. The contest is the top cake decorating competition in the country. Natalie won $50 in cash and $50 in supplies for taking first in the teen division for tiered wedding cakes.
She won with an Eiffel Tower cake that featured a scale-model replica of the iconic Parisian structure. (Her floral bouquet cake placed third.) Her father, Tim, helped her create a wooden form covered in parchment paper to reproduce the bend of the monument. The 17-inch tower was made from pastillage (a sugar creation that dries hard) and is piped with royal icing. The tower’s dome was made from white chocolate covered in edible sparkle.
Getting the proportions right was not easy.
“I took the actual calculation of the full-sized Eiffel Tower in France and reduced them down to a size that would fit on a cake so that it would have the correct slope,” she said. “Then, to make the form that the pastillage would dry on, I had to reverse the slope.”
Who knew cake decorating took so much math?
Natalie, an eighth-grader at Oxford Middle School in Overland Park, taught herself to decorate cakes by reading books and watching the experts do it on the Food Network. She would freeze the TV shows, frame by frame, and try to copy all the advanced techniques. From there, it was a matter of endless trial and error until she mastered them.
She also is active in 4-H. That’s where she learned to draw, bake, sew, take pictures, paint ceramics, speak in public and train dogs. She has made a quilt, raised and shown heifers, and won the top award in the state for her speech last fall at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson.
She started with the group when she was only 7.
“My mom had grown up doing 4-H, and my brother was in 4-H,” Natalie said. “It was sort of a family thing.”
Natalie, the daughter of Tim and Jean New, is just as industrious in school, earning straight A’s and acting, singing and playing the clarinet and saxophone.
In her young life, Natalie has already created eight original (and elaborately decorated) cakes. The cake that won first in the national competition in Oklahoma is a replica of one she had previously entered in the 2009 Johnson County Fair.
For the national cake decorating contest, participants didn’t have to bake cakes. They were permitted to decorate cake forms. But the original Eiffel Tower cake Natalie made for the Johnson County Fair was painstakingly real. She made two massive square yellow cakes from scratch, each with cream cheese icing and lemon filling. Together, they were big enough to feed 100 people. The cakes took 44 eggs, separated, two pounds of butter, and a pound and a half of cream cheese.
Recognizing her ability, Natalie’s parents took her to Texas when she was 10 to meet and train with famed cake artist Bronwen Weber. Weber, owner of Frosted Art Bakery in Dallas, is a frequent competitor on the “Food Network Challenge” and one of the pre-eminent cake decorators in the country. She remembers Natalie’s visit.
I think the cake world should watch out,” she said. “Someday soon, a star will be born,”
Cake decorating has stars today with shows on cable television, including TLC’s “Cake Boss” and the Food Network’s “Ace of Cakes.” Contestants have made wedding and birthday cakes on “Food Network Challenge.”
Natalie does more than bake and decorate cakes. She teaches other kids from ages 7 to 12 to do what she does.
Last year in Johnson County, Kan., all five of her students won purple ribbons (the top prize) for their cakes in different categories. Natalie gave a cake decorating presentation in November at the Olathe, Kan., public library.
So, given her considerable talents, the question is natural: Is she going to be a professional cake decorator when she grows up?
No, she says. Cake decorating is too stressful.
So what does she want to be?
“A pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon,” she says.
She’s not kidding.
“When I was 8 years old, my dad had open-heart surgery,” she said. “And the kind of surgeon who saved my dad’s life was a cardiothoracic surgeon.”
She has always loved kids, so becoming a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon just made sense.
“I really, really like kids,” she said. “Having a job in the future where I could help them would be very rewarding.”
Besides, her older brother, Jake, is a freshman at Kansas State University. He’s studying to become an orthopedic surgeon.
Natalie also has an adoring 8-year-old sister, Sophia.
Sophia’s eyes brightened when she thought about her big sister.
“She can do anything!” she said.
Especially cake decorating. The techniques Natalie has mastered are not easy for anyone, let alone one so young. Take the roses she made for the bouquet cake (and the Eiffel Tower cake). How does she makes them look so realistic?
Her answer: gum paste and a lot of patience.
What is gum paste?
“It looks like white clay,” Natalie says.
She keeps it in a plastic bag.
For the curious, here’s exactly how Natalie makes her sugary roses.
“First, I take a pea-sized bit of gum paste from the Baggie and roll it into a teardrop shape,” she said. “Then I put it on the end of green floral wire. Then I take more gum paste – about the size of a golf ball – and put it through a pasta roller six times until it was so thin you could see through it. Then I’d take a small teardrop-shaped cookie cutter, and cut out six petals. I’d roll each one out with a tiny wooden rolling pin, then shape the petals so they would have the natural flow of a real flower petal. Each one of those I would have to paste on to the teardrop-sized ball on the wire with water. It would just stick there. Then I would repeat this for two more layers, gradually getting bigger and bigger cookie cutters, until I formed the whole flower.”
Then it was time to paint. She spent three days creating the color combinations on her palette. She used powdered food coloring called petal dust. The food coloring comes in certain basic colors. But that wasn’t good enough for Natalie.
She would combine colors to create the exact shades that she wanted – coral, pink and yellow.
“All of the flowers are tipped in different colors,” Natalie said. “And all of the edges are different colors.”
She would obsess over each one, often spending so much time on it that her mother would have to urge her to take a break.
“Thus the reason we think she will do well as a surgeon,” Jean New said. “She has the most incredible focus you’ve ever seen. There’s a zone that she’s in where she doesn’t get frustrated, and she doesn’t get confused. She just keeps working and working and working.”
Tim New said he’s amazed by his daughter’s ability.
“As a parent, you wish you could take credit for those things, but truly she just has an amazing attention to detail, and she has this knack where she is able to picture in her mind exactly what she wants, and then she sticks with it until she gets it. It may be way outside her skill set, but she just sticks with it until she gets it.
“To me, with Natalie, the most interesting part is waiting to see what she is going to do next … and not only with cakes,” he said.
Natalie’s mother has no cake decorating skill but still wants to assist her daughter with the challenging tasks.
Ultimately, though, she has learned it’s best to leave it to Natalie.
“She had to ask me in the kindest way possible not to help,” Jean New said. “She said. ‘I have to redo everything you do.’”
Oh, the curse of talented children.
“Jake won so many awards at Blue Valley Northwest, and (got) scholarships,” Jean New said. “People always said, ‘Boy, Natalie, you’ve got some big shoes to fill!’ But her dad and I think she’s amazing in her own right. I mean, look at her. She was already a national champion at 13!”
Natalie returns the compliment.
“My parents are very nice, because I’ll get some crazy idea like making a replica of the Eiffel Tower, and they’ll be like, ‘Well, knock yourself out!’”