Altreisha Foster takes great care to make each cake personal to her customers. Photos: Chris Emeott
Baker creates gourmet cakes that defy expectations—and sometimes gravity.
It’s architecture, it’s science and it’s eminently edible.
When Altreisha Foster signed up for a cookie-making class in 2016, she had no idea where that creative outlet would lead her. “It was just something to keep me occupied,” Foster says. The public health practitioner was pregnant at the time and couldn’t travel for work. “I was always used to just going and going because I was always an overachiever at school,” she says. “I never really took the time to find out what hobbies I had outside of the scholastic part of my life.”
But baking came easily to Foster, much to her and her family’s surprise. “My husband tells the kids all the time that he was the one who would make the box cake [for birthdays],” Foster says with a laugh. She began baking a variety of items, drawing inspiration from bakers on Instagram. Six months into posting her creations, ELLE reached out for an article about modern cakes. “I was like, ‘What?’ I just couldn’t understand,” Foster says. “I’m just fooling around here. It’s a hobby for me, and you’re interested in one of my cakes.” Although ELLE ultimately didn’t include her in the magazine article, Foster says this was when she thought she might be onto something, and Sugarspoon Desserts was born.
Foster’s scientific background plays a key role in her wedding cake designs. “I’m very lean. I’m very neat. I’m very meticulous, and it’s all about science,” she says. This ethos comes to the fore when viewing the talented baker’s oeuvre, which contains architectural façades, intricate textures and towering tiers. But Foster’s modernist creations also required research in a new field. “I was self-taught for a long time and trying to figure out how people are holding these huge structures together,” she says. She turned to the instruction of bakeries, including Toronto’s LiMa Cakes and Australia’s Marina Machado Cakes, and flew as far as Switzerland to learn new cake styles and techniques.
A steady hand and creative mind result in beautiful cake creations by Altreisha Foster.
As the sole baker behind Sugarspoon Desserts, Foster accepts around two to three wedding cake commissions per month. Once a couple completes the inquiry form, she schedules a 30 minute call with them. “I want to learn about you,” Foster says. Some of the questions out of the gate include what drew the couple to her and which Sugarspoon creations called to them specifically, though Foster shies away from doing repeats. “I love to work with color, so once I understand who the couple is, I can make recommendations,” she says.
If a client is inspired by a wedding cake, Foster asks for six to 10 more examples. “I want to get this person’s personality to see what types of cake that she likes,” she says. From there, Foster incorporates elements from each of the inspiration cakes to compose a sketch. “I would say nine out of 10 times, they go along with the sketch that I present to them as opposed to just doing someone else’s cake,” she says.
But Foster is also familiar with one of her cakes serving as a major source of inspiration for couples. “My big break, I would say, came from when I did this seven-tiered cake for The Bachelorette a couple of years ago,” she says. The towering white cake was adorned with 200 red roses to commemorate the 200th episode of the TV show, which was filmed in Minneapolis during the 18th season. “[Clients] were bringing [me] this cake because it was on the television. It was everywhere,” Foster says. “I didn’t want to keep recreating that cake. For me, I had to be really persistent in trying to bring out the couple’s personality as opposed to this one trick.”
n area couple’s cake served as a particularly challenging but rewarding feat. The design consisted of six tiers of pillow replicas, stacked one on top of the other, each with its own cake flavor. “That, to me, was one of my favorite cakes to make because it actually tested me; I hand carved those pillows,” Altreisha Foster says.
Rather than being pigeonholed, Foster has continued to experiment and grow in her artistry, and her cakes have graced the dessert tables of couples across the Twin Cities. Event planner Ashley Mansy of Poppati Events is a frequent collaborator, bringing elaborate cake designs to Foster for her Lake Minnetonka area clients. For a recent Minnetonka wedding, Foster crafted over 50 delicate wafer roses, dusted in shades of pink and brown. “We had sugar sails that were wrapping this 36-inch cake, and it was just amazing,” Foster says.
Sugarspoon Desserts
Instagram: @sugarspoondesserts
