My name is Elizabeth Marek. I have always been an artist but I got my start in the professional world by first going to graphic design school and becoming an Art Director at an ad agency. I really hated the work and would come home every day so stressed with my back hurting. I used to calm down by watching Ace of Cakes on Food Network every night when it hit me, maybe I could make cakes just like Duff and sell them to people who actually wanted a cool piece of art at their celebration!
So, I quit my job! It was a crazy first couple of years, working multiple jobs, trying to drum up cake orders and meet with clients in between working at Great Harvest as a pastry baker, churning out cakes at Safeway in the bakery department and learning as much as I possibly could (this was way before YouTube, anyone remember flickr?)
Anyway, fast forward 7-8 years and here we are, I had a successful career as a cake decorator, became one of the top wedding cake artists in the Portland, OR area and won a ton of awards. So what's next? Well, I'm currently working on teaching and competing at cake shows. I love to teach in person classes, and I really enjoy meeting other cake decorators and interacting with them.
While I can't meet everyone or teach everywhere, I do have an online cake school where I make amazing cakes and then break down how to make them into easier steps. My school is called Sugar Geek Show, and I put up about 2 cake tutorials every month.
One of the things I learned as a cake decorator working on wedding cakes all the time was that often when I needed to learn something, I'd buy a tutorial and it would only teach me one step of the process that I actually needed to know, or I'd learn how to do something 1 way but not in the way I actually needed to use it, so I thought, "What if instead of having to buy Craftsy tutorials one at a time I just make my school have a monthly membership for about the price of one of those Craftsy tutorials when they are on sale, and then you could have access to every tutorial on the site, kind of like Netflix?" So, that's what we did, you can have access to over 100 tutorials on our website all for the price of about 1 Craftsy tutorial when they are 50% off (and when are they not?) that way if you're ever in a bind and NEED to learn something at 2am for a cake that's failing, you don't also have to cough up a ton of extra money to learn it. :)
Sugar Geek Show is a one-stop cake decorating school. With other 100 cake tutorials and 50 hours of easy-to-follow instructions, you're going to go from zero to cake decorating hero in no time.
Check me out on:
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sugargeekshow
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sugargeekshow
twitter: https://twitter.com/lizzomarek
:)
