Artistic Desserts specializes in wedding cakes, but from what I saw, Mike does cakes for all occasions and other desserts and unique chocolate sculptures as well.
We met with Pastry Chef Michael Markwitz at his (very nice) home to go over our wedding cake selections. We were served full-sized slices of his incredibly delicious moist cakes in his dining room, on Lenox china with a freshly brewed pot of coffee. HUGE slices of delicious cake - so you can taste each one several times as you're narrowing down what you want.
He combines whatever filling you want with whatever kind of cake you want, so again - big slices of fresh delicious cake really help when you're mixing stuff up to make an educated decision.
He helped us select the number of tiers we wanted and even suggested keeping the cake shorter and offered to make a couple of cakes on the side to save money. Not sheet cakes, the same awesome round cakes with fabulous fillings. The cake is cut and served in the back anyway, so no one would notice either way and the quality of the cake is identical. Since we're having a backyard wedding, he even gave us tons of detail on how to cut and serve the cake and drew me a little diagram as well (there is an art to cutting a huge wedding cake without butchering it and I'm grateful he took the time to explain.)
We have three tiers and he doesn't charge any extra if we wanted to do all three tiers with different cake flavors and fillings.
The Cakes:
Red Velvet with cream cheese frosting - the cake and icing were dense and delicious without the cloying sugary sweetness or unsweetened butter greasiness of a lot of other bakeries' cakes and icings.
Some kind of white italian cream cake with a layer of Swiss imported seedless raspberry marmalade and a second layer of custard creamy goodness.
Dense and delicious lemon cake with raspberry cream - we went with this one. Again, not too sweet, not TOO dense - just right.
The chocolate - holy goodness. There was some kind of incredible ganache filling in there that was to die for.
He made another cake with crushed peanut butter cups in the filling - this was my fiance's fave and it was delicious as well. Believe it or not, I am not a huge fan of cake overall, but you can't NOT love this guy's cakes. They are fabulous and they are beautifully decorated.
He spent well over an hour with us at 7:00pm on a weeknight to accommodate our work schedules. He scrolled through endless pictures of cakes he had decorated so we could see some examples and he made some great recommendations. He let us try samples of fondant even though the cake we were selecting was iced with buttercream. It was light and soft and tasted almost like marshmallow. Not at all what I expected fondant to taste like, but he makes his own and it is delicious.
When I went off on a holy-crap-i-never-even-thought-of-that-what-an-awesome-looking-cake tangent, he brought me back to my original vision for a simple, plain, classic wedding cake, even though the other option that caught my fancy would have cost a significant amount of money and truly would have been an impulse-buy. The man is a professional.
Damn it I love independent businesses who haven't gotten so big and self-important that they forget about their customers. What a drastic difference between a tasting in the home of someone who loves what they do, and an impersonal tasting at a busy bakery that barely gives a crap about you and expects a healthy deposit in advance before they do you the huge favor of serving you silver-dollar sized stale morsels of inferior cake.
He takes consultations by appointment only, so you'll want to plan in advance if you need a cake. His site has a lot of great pictures as well.
I highly, highly recommend Michael and his wonderful cakes. We drove an hour to get to our tasting and it was so worth it. He is very friendly, very knowledgeable and very interested in making sure you get exactly what you want for a fair price. It was a great experience and a fabulous reminder of why I love shopping small, independent operations most of all. read more
