Meet the baker behind Olivia Culpo and Mariah Kennedy-Cuomo wedding cakes
In the town of Rehoboth, chef Mark Soliday of Confectionery Designs is making wedding cakes that are gracing the pages of national magazines.
When Mariah Kennedy-Cuomo married Tellef Lundevall on July 20 in Hyannisport, their dramatic eight-layer wedding cake was inspired by one served at Eunice Kennedy's wedding to Sargent Shriver back in 1953. Mariah's cake was made by Confectionery Designs, said the spread in People.
Olivia Culpo married Christian McCaffrey in Watch Hill in June, and there's the photo in Vogue of their six-tier wedding cake with alternating tiers of vanilla sponge and red velvet cake made by Confectionery Designs.
Non-disclosure agreements with both couples mean Soliday, and his wife and business partner, Marie Soliday, can't share photos or say much. But the public relations team for Kennedy-Cuomo did share details of the epic cake and a photo. The Culpo wedding planner couldn't.
But Mark Soliday can talk wedding cakes all day long in the most entertaining of ways. He's not new to the business. In fact, he refers to his 38 years of experience. This year has been different, though.
"We are just crossing into the realm of celebrity," he said.
Dig into Mariah Kennedy-Cuomo's wedding cake
Before he talks cake design, making and assembly, here are the fun facts about Mariah Kennedy-Cuomo and her wedding cake. She is the daughter of Kerry Kennedy and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Her maternal grandfather was the late Robert F. Kennedy. Both the bride and groom graduated from Brown University.
Their eight-tier cake was lemon pound cake with raspberry cream filling, chocolate pound cake with vanilla bean filling and strawberries. There was a thin layer of lemon curd between the two flavors.
Due to the cake's height and weight, it required a custom-designed support system. The cake took from 60 to 75 hours to complete. It required the building of a support system, baking, icing, piping and the making of sugar flowers.
Mariah's cake was topped with a sterling silver bell, as was Eunice Shriver's back in 1953. Mariah's had a red ribbon with the couple's engagement date engraved on it. It was gifted by a close family friend, Melissa DeRosa.
Mariah had to use a ladder to climb to the top to cut the cake. The entire cake was consumed on the night of the wedding.
What led to celebrity wedding cakes
The Solidays' background working at five-star hotels prepared them for the demands of creating wedding cakes for many brides in Newport, which Mark described as a "Mecca for weddings." Many from out of state, especially those in New York City, find the costs one-third of what they'd be in Manhattan. So business is booming in Rhode Island.
Their cakes average between $2,000 and $6,000. In New York, the cost of wedding cakes starts at $16,000 and tops out at $30,000.
Mark Soliday grew up in Pennsylvania. Marie is from Ireland. They both worked in resort hotels, he after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America. They met at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia, where he was learning from a French pastry chef and she was honing her front-of-the-house skills.
They traveled and worked in Dublin, where they were part of the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts’ opening team. They returned to Pennsylvania when they had the first of their three children, Aidan, and ran restaurants and banquet homes. Children Una and Fiona followed.
The Solidays moved to New England 22 years ago to grow their wedding cake business. Mark teaches at JWU as an associate instructor in pastry arts.
The challenges of wedding cakes are most felt with their delivery. The Solidays have two refrigerated vans that allow them to deliver the cakes in a controlled environment.
Then the fun starts.
Humidity is the enemy of the sugar flowers. But high temperatures can destroy a cake as it is built in a ballroom or sits under a tent. Buttercream and heat do not mix. Soliday has even learned to raise the temperature in the refrigerated van as they approach the destination. They have to be careful the cake is not shocked by going from cool environs to heat. Global warming is no friend of wedding cakes.
"Having a melted cake is on no one's wish list," he said. They stress to the couple that they always have to do what is right for the cake. That might mean not bringing it into the wedding until well into the reception.
The labor to create a wedding cake is also not to be underestimated. llanna Shawver, Joshua Adams, Auroa Lomas and Daylan Torres are part of the Soliday team who create, adorn and deliver the cakes. The Solidays' daughters Fiona and Una are also involved.
All staff are cross-trained, including making the signature sugar flowers, so they can dive in on a moment's notice. They also have to divide to conquer. On the day of the Kennedy-Cuomo wedding on Cape Cod, while Mark was handling eight tiers of cake, Marie was at a second wedding in Newport.
They will do 70 weddings this year, down from an average of 80 to 100. That's OK with him, said Mark. The year after the COVID pandemic, they did 150 and that was too many to meet all the demands.
How the wedding cake process works
The wedding cake process begins with Marie Soliday meeting the couple, bride or mother. They work on concepts and share their hopes for the cake. Some are realistic and some are not. Many today want the cake to mirror the wedding dress. Others want a color match with flowers that the florist won't select until the week of the wedding.
Couples want a lot from their cake and the reason is social media. Their wedding photos go out across the world the day after the wedding, not months later.
Couples are "Pushing the bar higher and higher for what they want," he said.
The white wedding cake still rules, but the cake inside does not have to be white. The surprise of cutting into a red velvet, lemon or chocolate cake is part of the fun, said Soliday.
Soliday said his most expensive cake to date cost $9,000 and he made it years ago. It was 8 feet and 8 inches. Each layer was separated by sugar flowers. His profit was $100 because he miscalculated the amount of labor needed for all the detailed work.
Making elaborate wedding cakes involves not just baking but chemistry, science and engineering.
For a tall or elaborate cake, Soliday has to create an internal structure to support the tiers. For a recent cake, he consulted an engineer to make sure his thought process was correct.
“I had to take out my table saw, and then of course I had to make it food-safe,” he said.
When he assembled that cake on a recent hot summer day, he moved the table four times before settling on a solid base. Then he painstakingly assembled the cake.
"I looked up and it wasn’t straight," he said. He started to panic when his assistant Daylan Torres told him it just needed to settle. With all the levels they used it really was straight.
"Then there was a pop," he said. "I almost had a heart attack."
But when he looked up, the cake was straight.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Mark Soliday's Confectionery Designs did Culpo and Kennedy-Cuomo cakes
