By Melissa Wagoner
It all started with a bouquet of cupcake flowers.
“My longtime friend sent me a picture from Pinterest… and said, ‘I want you to make these,’” Judy Moffitt Marston recalled.
A lifelong baker, Moffitt Marston was no stranger to the kitchen, but she had never attempted anything quite so grand as a cupcake decorated to look exactly like a real flower.
“I stayed up until 3 a.m. making a huge bouquet,” Moffitt Marston said.
And in the end, she had a creation she was really proud of. Which made her think – what other flowers can I make?
“I look at different flowers all the time,” she said of the inspiration she finds all around her. “When you’re doing flowers in nature nothing’s the same. I never know what my bouquets are going to look like. Some I don’t even know what they are. But my favorites are daffodils, hydrangeas and roses.”
Via word of mouth, Moffitt Marston’s cakes and cupcakes have been featured at several small weddings and enumerable birthday parties throughout the Silverton community where she has lived her entire life.
“For my grandkids I did a tea party,” she said, describing an event which featured a table decorated with edible flowers located in a field of miniature ponies.
“I like doing stuff like that,” she laughed.
Always up for a challenge, Moffitt Marston didn’t bat an eye when her childhood friend, Dodie Brockamp, suggested she compete in the Greatest Baker Competition – an international competition where both amateur and professional bakers compete online for $10,000 and a spot in Bake from Scratch magazine.
“You don’t have to go anywhere, you just have to show pictures,” Moffitt Marston said.
But that doesn’t mean the contest wasn’t challenging. In fact, 25,000 bakers entered the competition, the winner of which was determined through a public voting process.
“It’s a popularity thing for the most part,” Moffitt Marston said. She came in sixth in the quarter-final.
“For a little lady down on Hicks Street, that’s pretty good,” she added.
And it’s inspired her to keep baking, even dreaming of a bike-based pop-up bakery business – “Granny Pedals Cupcakes” – that would enable her to share her creations with a wider audience.
“I wish I would have known in my 20s that I could do this,” she admitted. “Because I would have started a business. But I don’t want a business now.”
At least not one that ties her down or inhibits her creative drive.
“I always say, I bake with love and magic,” she said.
Judy Moffitt Marston
Cottage baker of edible bouquets
503-930-2538
