The cake went for $1,400.
The man who bought it never imagined the bidding would go that high.
“I was shocked when it got to $1,200,” Peter Rynders said.
When it did, he pondered, “How far am I going to go with this?”
Whatever it takes.
“I wasn’t just buying a cake,” he said, “I was showing support for the women’s volleyball team.”
And Peter Rynders is a big booster of the women’s volleyball team at Western Washington University.
And that cake for which he got into a bidding battle early this month? Well, he didn’t even realize it was a cake when he first saw it sitting there on a table at Viking Night, the major fundraiser for the WWU athletic program.
“I kept going back to the table and looking at it,” he said. “It looked more like a sculpture to me. It had the head of a Viking mascot, a pretty good size head. Just a perfect likeness.”
If he was surprised by the price it fetched, imagine how the cake’s creator reacted when the auctioneer finally shouted, “sold.”
Bailey Jones was shocked, but pleased that her culinary efforts had contributed to the WWU athletic coffers.
The Viking women’s volleyball coach, Diane Flick, knew she was getting a smart and talented player when she recruited Jones out of Kamiak High School, but admitted to being “stunned” when she learned about her creativity in the kitchen.
On Jones’ official recruiting visit to campus, Flick reminded her that she had a birthday coming up. Jones took the hint and made her a cake, but then stored it in a friend’s freezer. Flick finally got a picture of it but the Viking helmet atop the cake had been replaced with a Pilgrim’s hat in observance of Thanksgiving.
As a freshman this fall, Jones came into Western questioning whether she was “good enough to be on the floor.” She was and she is, having made the starting unit as a middle blocker. “I met her at a clinic when she was an eighth grader and kept tabs on her,” the coach said. “When she starts as a freshman, you know she’s doing something right.”
Doing things right is at the core of her makeup, be it in the classroom, on the court or in the kitchen. “She’s extremely meticulous and a perfectionist,” her mother Dianna said. “She works very hard at everything.”
She’ll spend as many as 10 hours a day on a cake-baking project that, she admits, will leave the kitchen in a mess for her mother to clean up.
But, oh, the creativity that abounds in that kitchen. “With Bailey,” her mother said, “it’s all about the art.”
It wasn’t until her junior year in high school that this talent to make artistic cakes emerged. She visited “Mike’s Amazing Cakes” in Redmond and was inspired to try her own hand at producing something amazing.
Her first endeavor was a three-tiered, “simple design” birthday cake for a friend. A week later, she made an iPod cake for another friend.
She found the work extremely fulfilling. “I loved making them,” she said.
Sometimes she would have an audience of friends or neighbors in the kitchen when she began a project, which normally takes between six and 10 hours. One of her early lengthy endeavors was the head of an elephant.
“I was surprised at how well it turned out,” she said. “It was the first time I had used my airbrush, which sprays colors and brings the cake to life.”
A graduation gift for her friend Kent Hamilton, the elephant held a diploma in its trunk. Not only was the cake pleasing to the eye, but it was tasty, said Hamilton, who attends the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. “I’ve seen (artistic) cakes like that before and they were really dry,” he said. “But this was really good.”
Jones can’t testify to how good her cakes taste. While she samples them during the cake-making process, she has yet to try the finished product.
In the two years since she discovered this new passion, she’s baked approximately 30 cakes, with designs as varied as a volleyball to a sidekick phone to a shopping bag to a lobster to a snowboard.
Some she’s given away, some she’s sold.
They aren’t cheap to make. On average, ingredients for each cake cost $50 to $100, with some requiring as many as 10 cake mixes.
Only once has she had a cake flop. And it literally collapsed. “I experimented with trying to make a tall cake,” she said. “I would not do it the same way if I did it again.”
Like any perfectionist, Jones feels stress at times during the creative process, but ultimately, she gets a rush from it. And she relishes the reaction of others to her cakes.
Someday, she’d like to widen her audience and open her own bakery.
First, though, she has other priorities: Earning her college degree as an industrial design major and helping the Vikings maintain the high level of play they’ve had under Flick, who directed them to a second-place finish in the NCAA Division II national championships two years ago.
Maybe sometime in the next four years, Jones can make a cake with a national championship trophy on top.
That might be worth $3,000 to Rynders.
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