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

Michael was awesome to work with. The tasting at his house in Westminster was great. He served us on his china and offered us tea and coffee. He gave us lots of different options to choose from as far as flavors and decorations. He also suggested that we have one of our flavors on a sheet cake that guests never see to save money, which we did. I've been to a lot of weddings where cake slices are left abandoned on the table, there is lots of cake leftover, etc. Our wedding was NOT like that at all. Everyone was talking about the cake and there was hardly any left! We had Italian Creme Cake w/Chocolate Ganache & Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Red Velvet w/Bourbon Cream Cheese Frosting, and Italian Creme Cake with Vanilla Pudding & Swiss Raspberry. All were amazing, but if I had to choose my favorite it would be the Reese's peanut butter cake! The cake looked and tasted wonderful! Seriously, this was one of those wedding vendors that just blew me away. I expected the cake to look and taste good, but it was AMAZING! read more

Artistic Desserts - a three tiered wedding cake - Custom Cakes Near Me

Chef Michael was great to work with, my wedding cake was delicious and was absolutely beautiful!

Exceeded expectations by far! We got married 3 months ago and had Michael make and design the cake. We found out about him because 4 years ago my husband's sister used this company for her wedding cake. For our wedding Aug 2014 everything went smoothly. He has many cake photos to choose from and very decorative stuff. He gave us different flavors of cake to try and they tasted wayyy better than "sugar bakers" or any other grocery stores in which we had tastings at. Then we did a conference call about the cake. He was good at customizing our design and styles. For instance, we had 2 layers of cake 1 flavor, the other 2 layers a different flavor. And our sheet cake was a 3rd flavor. Larger corporations are not as flexible with customizing. read more

Grooms beware! After tasting these cakes, your future wife may try to leave you for Mike! Its too bad he's already married and happily in love. Yes, I'm a little jealous is wife has such a talented husband and gets his delicious cakes anytime she wants. Moving on before my husband gets too upset. I love cake, sweets, and sugar. I will travel for a delicious slice of cake. I have bribed my husband for some cake. Most importantly, I literally pushed my husband out of my way on our wedding day while we were cutting the cake because he was slowing me down. From start to finish, Michael was pure pleasure to work with. I first met him and tasted his amazing cake at a bridal show at the Great Room in Savage Mill (where we had our reception). I was there with some of my girlies and called my husband to come down asap because I had found our wedding cake. We traveled to Michael's home for our tasting, which was an experience in itself. White table cloths, tea and coffee, slices of 6-8 different cakes and icing for us and our two guests, and lots of pictures of his previous work. He really is an artist in aesthetics and taste. I could go on and on about how moist his cakes are. The icing is the highest quality. The fillings are gourmet to say the least. The cakes are gorgeous! We chose the french vanilla cake with the raspberry and some type of vanilla creme with vanilla buttercream. This is my FAVORITE cake of all time. Nothing will ever come close. It was even amazing a year later out of the freezer for our anniversary. Michael delivered our cake on time, helped us stay in our price range, and was pure pleasure to work with. I do have a baby shower coming up! I'm going to give him a call! If you want the best, you will not regret using artistic desserts. read more

Michael did a beautiful and delicious wedding cake that I ordered literally over the phone and through emails. I was ordering from out of town a cake for my sisters wedding. He had me check out some of the cakes on his Facebook page to narrow down the style. He specializes in an Irish cream filling so we went with some layers of that. And since the groom likes chocolate, he did an amazing chocolate raspberry filling as well. He did a combed effect with the icing, wrapped the bottom of each layer with the color ribbon we chose and garnished the cake with just the right amount of flowers( the exact color we talked about). Everyone said how beautiful the cake was decorated and could not believe how good it was. I hope I get to order another cake in the future. Michael will definitely receive referrals from me as I have tons of family and friends in his area. Thank you so much for an amazing wedding Cake!! Michael is so easy to work and excellent in his craft. read more

Our wedding cake was one of my favorite parts of our wedding, and it was all because of Michael at Artistic Desserts. We started with a very basic idea: Legos, and he ran with it to create an amazing masterpiece, complete with Lego wedding party members (supplied by us). Not only was it amazing to look at, but the cake was one of the best I have ever had (and I have a sweet tooth). Everyone was saying how it was amazing, and I do not feel guilty saying I ate 4 pieces the night of our wedding! read more