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Welcome back to Chef in the Kitchen, a recurring Eater photo feature where we boldly go where few diners have gone before — into Las Vegas restaurant kitchens — to get a sneak peek of the chef du jour hard at work.
When a celebrity is celebrating a birthday or a big bash in Vegas, you can almost guarantee that Miranda Prince and Kristen Wiese are behind the cakes. The two run Gimme Some Sugar, a bakery that specializes in extravagant cakes, not just for celebrities, but for the masses as well.
Inside their Henderson storefront that opened nine months ago, Prince and Wiese bake up these creations. Two weeks ago, it was a cake for Britteny Palmer, the UFC ring girl who celebrated her birthday at Pure Nightclub at Caesars. Nicole Scherzinger, the reality TV star, merited two cakes for her birthday at Tao at the Venetian, including one from Herbal Essences that required Wiese to hand shape fondant into shampoo and conditioner bottles.
“We compose a couple of rough drafts to see how the colors will flow,” Wiese says. For Scherzinger’s Herbal Essences cake, they started with an orange and blue motif, colors found on her Website, but decided to tone down the blue and make it into more of a taupe color.
“Sometimes we see the billboards before we get the order,” Wiese says. “We usually get the orders the week of an event, and if we’re lucky, a week before.” That sometimes means a mad scramble to come up with a concept for these multi-tiered sensations.
The partners met while working at the Bellagio. Prince mainly worked on the cakes team while Wiese handled chocolates at Jean Philippe Patisserie. By 2009, the duo set up their own bakery and started landing nightclubs as clients. Prince says a birthday cake for reality star Kim Kardashian got the ball rolling. “It just didn’t look like a cake she would have,” she says. The next week, they landed their first order for Kid Rock’s birthday cake, creating a delight shaped like a Jim Beam bottle of whiskey.
Most interesting? The bottom tiers of the cake are usually fondant wrapped over Styrofoam. “They usually don’t eat the cake, so only the top is real,” she says.
Right now, the Henderson location is by appointment only, but soon the duo hopes to open a retail outlet with cupcakes, brownies, cakes and other sugary treats in the Summerlin area.
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