Calgary cake master shares talent for design
Calgary decorator shares her skills at small home-studio classes
A 227-kilogram cake shaped like a horse and wagon. A zombie cake, for a family that likes to watch The Walking Dead together. A life-size Captain America bust, for a kid who worships the Marvel superhero.
When it comes to creative cake decorating, Calgarian Lesi Lambert’s imagination knows no bounds.
The owner of Lambert Academy of Sugar Craft (lesiskitchen.com), she regularly creates extraordinary cakes for special occasions.
Think TLC’s Cake Boss or Ace of Cakes, but minus the TV cameras and in Calgary.
And she teaches others how to make and decorate cakes, too.
Lambert offers an array of classes, working out of a government-licensed commercial kitchen space in the basement of her southwest Calgary home.
Classes are purposely kept small — six students per group — and there are many to choose from.
Some are as short as one evening, while a certification program, for people who want to start their own business, runs full-time for five weeks and covers “every aspect of the cake business,” she says, “from costing to how to create special occasion cakes.”
Lambert says she finds it particularly rewarding when she teaches people who are unemployed or looking for a career change.
“I get a lot of immigrant women coming, looking to learn new skills they can use in Canada,” she says.
“And I get a lot of women who start their own businesses.”
One former student is now in New York City, working at a highend bakery; still another moved to Vietnam to teach underprivileged women her new-found cake-decorating skills.
“It makes me really happy, when someone can do that after taking my classes,” Lambert says.
Indeed, Lambert herself is no stranger to mid-life career changes. For 24 years, she worked in the medical profession, most recently as an ophthalmologist technician. When her boss retired, she decided to reinvent herself, rather than search for a similar medical job.
She had always loved baking and cake decoration and, seeing a hole in Calgary’s market, she decided to see if she could create a career out of it.
To brush up on her skills, she moved to Toronto to study at Bonnie Gordon College of Confectionary Arts. Then she came back to Calgary and set up shop.
“It started as a little hobby,” she says. “And then it took on a life of its own.”