When it came to baking, Nicole Huff’s “first challenge” was a white velvet birthday cake for her mom.
“The first really intricate cake I did, I made her (into) a character,” she said. “I made her out of sugar, sitting on the cake with some flowers. That was probably the first one I ever did that I was scared of.”
That was when Huff started “messing with” the rich white velvet cake recipe, made with sour cream and butter. It’s ideal for wedding cakes — and it’s Huff (and her mom’s) favorite flavor.
“We have all these fancy flavors out here and I’ll always go back to the white,” she said, gesturing at the array of breads, cookies and cupcakes at Southern Flour Bakery, which she owns with her father off Highway 45 in Columbus.
Huff’s journey to becoming a baker, from the heart-shaped cinnamon rolls she sells for Valentine’s Day to elaborate three-dimensional wedding and grooms’ cakes, began almost 30 years ago when she was a member of the U.S. Army and she started making birthday cakes and other goodies for her kids, Army buddies and church functions. She ended up liking it so much that when she left the Army, she used her G.I. bill benefits to go to school for baking.
She began baking custom cakes from home, while selling breads and cookies at local farmers markets to get her name out, and finally was able to open her first bakery, this one with her husband, in Clarksdale, Tennessee about 20 years ago.
Valentine’s Day and Christmas are her two busiest times of the year, Huff said. She also bakes a lot of cakes for special occasions — especially wedding cakes, a process that has changed over the years as trends and styles change and couples request more elaborate designs.
“They’re just more intricate,” Huff said. “… An average wedding cake can take 18 to 24 hours. Those are tough.
“Usually two weeks prior to even baking the cake, we’ll already make flowers or if they have characters that we’re putting on it,” she added. “Sometimes I’ll have to make a person out of chocolate or… flowers, rank, flags, airplanes … There are all kinds of things.”
The designs range from elaborate arrays of flowers to geode cakes — cakes designed to look like rocks that have been “busted open and crystallized” — to gold cakes made real 24-karat gold powder mixed with vodka.
“Twenty years ago, nobody was putting real gold on cakes,” Huff said. “Now you can buy it in a really fine powder.”
Her favorites are three-dimensional designs popular for grooms’ cakes. She’s done a red velvet armadillo inspired by the groom’s cake in the movie “Steel Magnolias,” along with football fields and footballs, even a truck designed to look like the actual old truck the groom was restoring at the time of his wedding.
She pulled up a picture of a cake baked to look like a toy RV, complete with a small chocolate picnic table, dog and other toy-sized props.
Those props and characters like are made out of modeling chocolate, which she said has a consistency like clay, so it can easily hold its shape.
“I can use clay tools with it, if I’m carving out a face,” she said. “It’ll melt a little bit in my hands, so it’s easier for me to smooth.”
Those more elaborate cakes may take 12 hours to decorate — and that’s after baking and letting it sit overnight — but Huff doesn’t mind. She says she’ll often be at work at 2 or 3 a.m., decorating in the quiet of her shop without the phone ringing or other distractions.
Of course, that’s all aside from the typical running of the shop, for which Huff credited her employees, some of whom, like her manager Rissa Perrigin, have begun making elaborate tiered cakes as well.
Perrigin said she got into baking when she was 9 years old and “made better pies than my mom.” Right out of college, she worked as a baker for companies like Baskin Robbins and Walmart before coming to Southern Flour.
“The opportunity to work for (Huff) came up and I couldn’t resist that,” she said. “Work for a small town, answer to one person.”
While Huff admits it’s a strange journey to go from being in the Army to owning a bakery and spending her weekends decorating three-dimensional RV cakes, she said the Army taught her a lot that’s been helpful in running a business, from organizational skills to managing employees.
“I really enjoy it,” she said. “I wouldn’t do anything else.”
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