By Cassandra Khan
BLACK cake is a Guyanese delicacy not many can resist. Saralise Ming, the owner of Noodle Cake Creations, on September 2 launched the CM Black Cake, her flagship product.

The Guyanese baker related that in 2012, she took a chance and started a custom cake business, which she named Noodle Cake Creations.

“Noodle, because it was strange enough to make it memorable, and Cake Creations because that’s exactly what it was; creative cakes,” Saralise said.

The year prior, she had graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York with a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) in Marketing and New Product Development, and, four years before that, a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology from the University of Guyana.

Saralise related that while it wasn’t an obvious career choice, she did come from a family of bakers.

“My maternal grandmother baked as a single parent to support her four children. Mom was her assistant, and she later taught me. I grew up around cake decorating magazines and icing tools,” she said.

Saralise related that her family friend had asked her to do a wedding cake after her original cake vendor suddenly cancelled. Saralise’s friend later put in an order for three birthday cakes after realising she had made a wedding cake.

“Another family friend expressed frustration over how difficult it was to find someone who made the more modern style cakes. There was an opportunity, and it was coming at me,” she said.

The day-to-day operations had started in her parents kitchen.

Saralise reflected on when her father would come home for lunch and watch her bake. Her father, Colin Ming, had realised that she was serious about her cake business, and so he pitched the idea of perfecting her mother’s black cake, since he thought it could be a “world class product”.

Her mother had fully supported the vision, and even told Saralise that the black cake was a gift from her because she was sure she would make it something amazing and “take it places”.

The first part of her journey was learning the fruit ratios.

“At the end of 2012, and under the guidance of mom, I set my very batch of boozy fruit mix. This mix eventually became what we’ve been calling the ‘Mother Mix’. Some was used for cake; some was mixed with new fruit to facilitate the curing process. New fruit is always added to old fruit to keep the aging process going. The alcohol keeps it nicely cured,” she explained to this publication.

Saralise’s fruit has been in rotation from then to present, for almost a decade, which, according to her, is what makes it so special.

She said that the fruit blending aspect was the easy part. Her black cake is unlike any other, she said before relating that the mixing and baking techniques were completely unique.

“Even with a recipe and mom’s guidance, it took a while to first learn her version and then to figure out the tweaks. As the orders came in, I was working on it,” Saralise said.

Around May each year, her father would travel to play golf with his buddies in Myrtle Beach, where he would usually take her mother’s black cake. In 2019, Saralise was allowed to bake the black cake for the trip, and after, her father called her and said someone wanted to speak with her.

“We exchanged our greetings and a bit of small talk. Then, he said, ‘but I was asking to speak with your mother, where is she?’ I could hear Dad in the background saying, ‘No; you asked to speak with the baker, and I gave you the right person.’ The next thing I heard was, ‘Did you really bake that cake? I wanted to talk to your mom to tell her that this one is the best one that we’ve ever had over all these years.’”

She related that her father had come back to the phone and said, “Well, I wanted you to know. You did it. You have a world-class product.”

She added: “From there we started discussing packaging ideas, but as the pandemic hit in early 2020, our work paused. Then, in early 2021, my dear dad suddenly passed. His last slice of our black cake was still in the fridge waiting for him to finish.”

She expressed that the journey had become harder, knowing that he was no longer there with her, and she thought about scrapping the project.

“One thing about dad, though, he didn’t like quitting. He wouldn’t have wanted me to quit. So, I took all the memories of the conversations we would have had over the years and pulled them together,” Saralise said.

“What we have here is exactly as he described it to be. The packaging needed to be a sturdy material to support the weight of the cake; it needed to represent luxury, finesse and class. The cake needed to be rectangular in shape to facilitate easy symmetrical cutting. The almond paste needed to be generous, just because he liked it so,” she told this publication.

Saralise said the branding was done in his honour, because he was popularly known as CM, and the style of the font was inspired by his signature.

The cake is a representation of a father and daughter’s love, and is a product of the time they spent together.

It is available at her store, located at Lot 12 Light Street. She can also be contacted on 685-6122.

“Since this is an artisan product, it’s recommended that orders be placed in advance, especially as we get closer to the holiday season. It takes time to handcraft each cake through the baking, curing and packaging process. Also, at any given time, there’s only a specific amount of fruit mix which can be extracted for use. This is not a mass-produced item. For this reason, it’s being priced at US$100 [approximately G$20, 000],” she said.

Saralise added: “In keeping with dad’s devotion to the sporting community, I’m giving back to the Guyana Squash Association. For every black cake sold retail for the 2022 black cake season, US$5 [approximately G$1,000] will be donated. Dad would have been over the moon proud of the performance of the athletes in the recent international tournaments. He would definitely be supporting them, and I’ll honour that for him.”

Additionally, she said that, unofficially, customers have been travelling with black cakes in their suitcases for quite some time now, and recently, one customer took six of them to Canada.

“It only makes sense that getting the official CM Black Cake on the international market would be the next step,” she related.