Cake sculptors take on all designs in Food Network’s ‘Texas Cake House’
Take a look at the website of cake artists Natalie and Dave Sideserf of Food Network’s “Texas Cake House” and one gets the feeling they’re looking at works from Madame Tussaud’s.
On its homepage, in addition to the bleeding human heart, the T-bone steak and the unicorn, there are spookily realistic-looking cake likenesses of Willie Nelson, LeBron James, Elvira Mistress of the Dark, plus two stars from one of their favorite TV series, Bob Odenkirk and Jonathan Banks of “Better Call Saul.”
The Sideserfs made the cakes for AMC to appear in a “Saul” commercial and they got the attention of Banks himself.
“He actually was recently on ‘Conan’ and he thanked me by name,” Natalie Sideserf says. “They showed a picture of the cake and he said, ‘I never had a chance to reach out to Natalie Sideserf but I wanted to thank her for making that.’ And it was really, really awesome. I was very surprised.”
The Austin-based husband-and-wife team return for the series’ second season Monday, July 10, with more intricate designs and more adventures in high-end cake-making. Natalie, who has a degree in fine arts from Ohio State and a background in sculpting, creates the designs while Dave, who left his IT job to help, runs the business – when he’s not assisting with the cakes.
Business is booming and so as the season begins, they’re in the process of opening a storefront after years of baking out of their home. The opener sees the couple working on two projects: a jaguar for the San Antonio Zoo and a cricket for an Austin nonprofit – made from real cricket flour.
“Getting used to working with something like that and having it raise and making sure that the flavor is good (was challenging),” Natalie says. “Not that cricket flour tastes bad but the idea is we want it to taste like cake and that nobody can even tell that it’s made of crickets. So that was our goal.”
“And rather than covering up the taste of the cricket flour,” Dave adds, “... we came up with a recipe that really kind of features it and used it a way that was complementary to the flavors, not something we were trying to bury beneath something else.”