She puts the frosting on the wedding party – 600 times a year

CORRESPONDENT

All of Kelley Delaney’s training in several of the best culinary schools in the world, contributes to her success in her present business: baking wedding cakes. As owner of Cakes for Occasions at 57 Market St., Danvers, Delaney baked 600 wedding cakes last year. “We specialize in wedding cakes,” she said. “It’s a fun business, but you can’t have a bad day.

There is no room for error.

The cake must be exactly what the bride asks for. It’s her day and you have to be 100 percent.” To that end, Delaney initially meets with the bride for a onehour interview and then follows up with phone interviews. “The bride tells me about her theme and I try to match it on the cake.

It’s a great feeling to know you nailed it.” Delaney’s most popular cake, both for weddings and other special occasions, is her Opera Cake, which is a chocolate sponge cake infused with coffee after it is baked.

The traditional vanilla cake with butter cream frosting is a close second.

Third most popular is a lemon raspberry mousse cake which looks traditional. Cost is $3 to $5 per person for a total cost of $500 to $650 per wedding cake. The majority of brides serve these special cakes as dessert at the reception, which helps the budget.

Wedding guests have the choice of eating the cake on the spot, or getting it packaged for carrying home. Delaney grew up in Marblehead where she worked in two restaurants that her mother, Carol Flynn, owned in Marblehead — Eat Your Heart Out and Huck Flynn’s English Muffins. Her formal training began in Ballymaloe Cookery School in East Cork, Ireland.

She continued to work in Ireland for an additional nine months before moving on to study at Le Cordon Bleu culinary arts school in London. She came home to work in the Ritz Carlton in the pastry department where she stayed for three years.

While there, she started baking cakes for friends, using her mother’s kitchen.

Eventually, she outgrew the kitchen and opened her present business in 1996.

She married Frank Delaney in 1993. Frank has since quit his job with Fidelity Investments in Boston to help run the growing business. Over the last eight years she has baked cakes for thousands of brides and has become a fixture in downtown Danvers.

Her cakes are sold in several North Shore restaurants and from the shop at 57 Maple Street, which bakes cakes for all occasions, including birthdays, christenings and anniversaries. “I can connect a cake with a face and sometimes a bride walks into the shop a year or so after the wedding and I will say to her, ‘You were the woman who ordered the dogwood cake with lemon raspberry and had your wedding at Glenn Magna (historical mansion in Danvers).’ Other times, the former bride comes in to order a christening cake for her first child and it’s been four years since the wedding. “It seems like yesterday,” Delaney said.