Sylvia Weinstock, master of the wedding cake, dies at age 91
Sylvia Weinstock, the cake master who reinvented wedding cakes and designed desserts for hundreds of stars, died Monday. She was 91.
Weinstock died at her Tribeca home surrounded by family, The Knot reported.
Though she got a late start, Weinstock made so many unmatched wedding cakes that she became the biggest name in the business. She was so popular that people around the world ordered cakes from her Manhattan shop.
“We’ve got several wedding cakes, anniversaries, birthdays, the whole thing going at the same time,” she told the Daily News in 2008. She once made one client a wedding cake and then four years later gave the same client a divorce cake.
Her cakes could be seen at the weddings of Mariah Carey, Billy Joel, Sofia Vergara and Robert De Niro, among many others, including the union between Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Born Jan. 28, 1930 in Brooklyn, Weinstock was a school teacher for much of her early career. She was teaching on Long Island when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
When she beat cancer, she embarked on a new hobby: baking cakes. She got good enough to impress famed chef William Goldberg, who encouraged to start a business.
With that ringing endorsement, she launched her own professional shop in 1980 at age 50, baking cakes by appointment. Her signature buttercream frosting became a must-have.
“If you have great skills, as my staff does, you can make buttercream look just like fondant,” she said in 2008. “(The cakes are) smooth, and they’re well put together.”
But even more than her buttercream, Weinstock’s cakes were known for their preposterously realistic flowers, which looked so real they felt inedible.
Weinstock taught herself how to make them by taking apart actual flowers and piecing them back together.
“Our goal is to try to duplicate as closely as possible what nature does,” she told the News. “It’s a sugar dough; you roll it out, and you cut each petal to shape and put it in the palm of your hand, and you build up the petals and you put them together.”
Weinstock officially retired in 2016, though she went back to work for special occasions like the wedding of Bill Gates’ daughter Jennifer in October. When Weinstock stepped into the wedding cake world, it was defined by basic white, tiered cakes. Now, it’s defined by extravagance, a push she helped engineer.
But when she was baking for herself, Weinstock kept things simple.
“I love yellow butter cake,” she said in 2008, “and I love it with lemon curd and fresh raspberries. I always find that delicious.”
