Before moving to Los Angeles from New York in 2008, Kimberly Bailey — who today is considered the “queen of cakes” — only had one recipe. It was for a carrot cake, one that she had mastered at age 16 in a high school home economics class, back when girls learned how to bake and sew while boys worked on junk cars.
For years, she honed that single recipe until she felt comfortable taunting the owners of the old Eisenberg’s deli across from the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. “It was a great place, but it sold shit cake,” Bailey remembers. “I told the owner, and he asked me if I could do better.”
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The Art Institute of Philadelphia graduate could — and did. Soon, Eisenberg’s carrot cake became the stuff of legend, and the family behind the sandwich shop went to great lengths to protect Bailey’s recipe. “I’ve always had a tremendous drive to create with my hands,” she says. But the last thing she envisioned when she decided to move to Los Angeles was a future as a Food Network baking judge and the go-to custom cake designer for the stars.
Holiday cake available at the Butter End’s Santa Monica brick-and-mortar store Courtesy of Kimberly Bailey
People still talk about Bailey’s wedding cake for Kaley Cuoco for her first wedding in 2013: a six-tiered cake made with both almond with toasted almond cream cheese buttercream frosting and chocolate almond cherry with cherry cream cheese buttercream frosting, then encrusted with rhinestones and hung upside down from one of the crystal chandeliers that decorated the room. “It was the cake heard round the world,” Bailey says.
Cuoco’s first marriage didn’t last, but Bailey’s custom cake business, the Butter End (thebutterend.com), did. One cake led to another and another. The Food Network came knocking for Bailey to serve as a judge. Making cakes, Bailey believes, helped her survive cancer. Twice. “When you are in your darkest hour physically, people are worried about you. When you feed them, you are not a sick person, you are a baker, you are an artist,” Bailey says. “When you are battling cancer, dropping a pin on something in the future is very important.”
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That pin initially came with the Gardena building she bought to start a bakery and cake academy — which came after her landlord (whom she calls Satan) at the Santa Monica space she opened in 2010 raised the rent by 240-percent six years later. For years, she concentrated on her custom orders until last year when the owners at her longtime competition in Santa Monica, Vanilla Bake Shop, called to see if Bailey was interested in taking over the shop at 512 Wilshire Blvd. With that, the Butter End was back on the Westside. She decorated her new space with her husband, Adam, and their children, Bailey, 6, and Quinn, 3.
Kimberly Bailey beat cancer twice and opened her new Santa Monica bakery with help from her husband and two children Courtesy of Kimberly Bailey
“I come at this from an artist’s background. I am also a big foodie so it has to be great,” says Bailey, whose custom cakes can start around $600 and go into the “many, many thousands.” The bakery also sells more approachable sweets. “We don’t do ‘wedding cakes,’” she notes. “We do delicious, rich cakes that might have been made by your grandmother.”
