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Dame Ellen Bartlett
Walking into Ellen Bartlett's cake shop Cakes to Remember is like walking into a sugar plum shop. On display are more than a dozen sugar wrought cakes of all colors and designs, creating a feast for the eyes.
Cakes to Remember has exclusive relationships with some hotels in Boston: The Four Seasons, The Fairmont Copley Plaza, The InterContinental, The Ritz on the Common, as well as being recommended by the Boston Harbor Hotel, The Liberty Hotel, The Mandarin Hotel, to name a few.
Ellen's interest in baking emerged as a little girl who enjoyed being in the kitchen constantly baking bread, cookies, cakes, and tarts right through her school years. This passion continued through college with Ellen baking her first wedding cake at age nineteen for her sister's wedding.
While majoring in art at college and needing a job, she looked to the food service industry. This led to some soul searching endeavors after graduation. Knowing that food was where she belonged she gave herself ten years to find her niche. Experimenting along different avenues she traveled two years in Europe, and later returned to Paris to earn a certificate in baking at the Ritz; she cooked in an upscale New York City restaurant and created and tested recipes for the dessert chapter for the first The Silver Palate Cookbook all the while baking wedding cakes on the side.
In 1983, Ellen moved to Boston and cooked at the café Today's Bread in Jamaica Plain. In 1986 she established a catering business out of her apartment while working part time for caterer Phyllis Tobin. After 2 years, she decided to scale it back from catering to exclusively creating custom cakes. Taking a fondant and gum paste course at Lorraine's in Hanover solidified her technique for forming extraordinarily beautiful art pieces. In 1995, she achieved her dream of creating her own professional kitchen that originally was an upholstery shop. Not an easy task to undertake: fitting equipment and workspace into a compact area and allowing a place to showcase her finished products.
Being given freedom and independence at each of her jobs allowed her to learn on the job and follow her path, which ultimately contributed to her success as a custom cake shop chef and owner. Ellen is a professional whose passion echoes constantly as she speaks: beauty and flavor can be brought together memorably to make a lasting impression.
And from where does all this talent and ambition spring? Perhaps from her paternal great-grandmother who made wedding cakes in Concord, Massachusetts and from her maternal grandmother who edited one of the Fanny Farmers Cookbook in the 1930's as well as owning a teahouse, The Piped Pipe, in New York City's Greenwich Village.
Ellen looks forward to connecting with the Dames, sharing experiences, and being part of our community.
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