HELLO, I'M LIZ MAREK

Teaching is not something I ever thought I would do for a living, neither is baking. My father was a botanist, my mother was a homemaker who rarely baked and I was the artist in the family. I was always drawing or reading.

When I first started baking as a hobby in 2007, I didn’t even know what fondant was or how to make buttercream. I made a terrible box cake with canned frosting and a plastic duck on top as my first cake. It was horrifying but OMG did I love making it! I could not get enough! I was buying every book I could find and diving head first into making a cake for anyone that would take one.

I quickly started filling my freetime with cake orders from friends and family, to the point that it started interfering with my full-time job. After getting told by my boss that I couldn't work on anything creative in my freetime, I made the decision to quit that day and becoming a full-time cake decorator.

After a few years of making cakes professionally out of my home-based kitchen, I started competing professionally. I really enjoyed the challenge of competition and won a lot of awards which led to being invited to start teaching at cake shows, cake shops and conventions all over the world.

HOW IT STARTED

Along with make cakes out of my bakery, I decided to attend Oregon Culinary Institute for baking and pastry and that changed my life. There I learned the fundamentals of not only baking science but dedication, hard work and pride in taste AND appearance. I’ve been baking and experimenting with recipes ever since and LOVE coming up with new ones.

As my experience grew, my video tutorials on YouTube got longer and longer and more advanced. Eventually some people started complaining about the length of the tutorials on YouTube while others started asking if they could buy my tutorials.

I wasn’t sure how something like that was really going to work. I didn’t like the idea of trying to figure out how much to sell a tutorial for each time I made one so with the help of my husband Dan, we started an artist page on Patreon. Some of my members today where some of my very first patrons!

 

HOW IT'S GOING

Teaching classes was super exciting but also a little difficult considering we were just about to have our first child and I was working non-stop on cake orders and was in the middle of writing my first book.

Now I have to tell you… I grew up super poor. Any traveling we did was in our van and was as far as we could drive. Not that I’m complaining! I deeply appreciate all those family vacations we took together and all the memories made but all my life I have wanted to see how the rest of the world lives. Eat the food, see the culture and experience adventure with my family. I started to think it MIGHT be possible through teaching.

So in 2015, I officially closed Artisan Cake Company. My baby. My award-winning business that I grew from nothing and brought me so much joy. Boy oh boy was that hard! But I knew in order to get to where I wanted to be, I had to close the door on where I was.

Dan built our new website “Sugar Geek Show” named after my facebook group dedicated to teaching and sharing cake knowledge in a friendly and uplifting environment. The new site would be a membership site where you could watch as many videos as you wanted but only pay one price (like Netflix). I was terrified that people would not follow me from Patreon to the new platform but they did! Every day we continue to grow and I am amazed and SO thankful because without our beloved members, I wouldn’t get to do what I love for a living, work with my amazing husband, and travel the world with my family.

SUGAR GEEK UNIVERSITY

Sugar Geek Show has evolved over time into Sugar Geek University, the combined years of all of my techniques, tips, tricks and things I have learned along my journey.

Many other guest instructors have joined Sugar Geek University building out the classes and courses offered into a full-service cake decorating learning platform.

My goal is to teach you to become a great cake artist and provide you with everything needed to build a solid foundation of core skills. Every artist is unique and every cake decorator will find their own voice, my goal is simply to let you speak as an artist in this medium.

Join me on this journey together and let's sculpt some cakes!

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