Lucila Jimenez’s Exquisite Creations are part of a
Cuban – American Tradition

By: Fabiola Santiago
Herald Staff Writer

To celebrate each month of her children’s first year, Coral Gables housewife Lucila Jimenez baked whimsical cakes decorated in the shapes of childhood --- a stuffed bear, a sailboat, a little mouth showing a single tooth when Andres, the youngest of three, finally got his first.

Thirty years later, Jimenez is still baking special cakes to mark her family’s special moments --- and for hundreds of South Florida cake lovers, most of them Cuban Americans like herself who know that tradition calls for a fabulous cake at every family celebration.

Baptisms, birthdays, first communions, quinces, bridal showers, weddings, baby showers. Cuban family life revolves around the celebration of rites of passage --- all of them marked with a distinctive cake as the centerpiece of the fiesta. In some homes, even the feast days of saints like San Lazaro and Santa Barbara require a distinctive cake.

“Cakes mark the uniqueness of an occasion and we’re always celebrating something,” said Jimenez, owner of Sweet Art by Lucila, in South Miami and The Falls area. “Give us a table, food, and we’ll sit around it and celebrate.”

The confections run the gamut from the traditional fluffy, multicolored, merengue-topped cakes that fill the refrigerated shelves of small Cuban bakeries dotting Miami – Dade, and increasingly in Broward, to the personalized designer cakes that specialty bakers like Jimenez make.

“Sin el cake, no hay fiesta,” says Osvaldo Mayoral, owner of La Rosa Bakery on Flagler Street and LeJeune Road. Without cake, there’s no party.

One of a kind

Jimenez’s cakes are sweet works of art decorated with skill and imagination. Fondant icing is molded to look like lace, ribbons and ruffles. Sugar is turned into delicate flowers.

The cakes come in all sorts of shapes --- hats, hearts, boxes, books, christening gowns, a man’s shirt (tie and hankie included), a bottle of champagne. A miniature, heart-shaped, royal blue polka dot box is an exact replica of a porcelain box in a Tiffany’s catalog. A three-layer teal cake with a white floral pattern looks like stacked, fancy boxes.

Her birthday cakes are-one-of-a kind. For a ski lover, Jimenez made a cake shaped like a snow-covered mountain with a skier on top. No plastic figurines here. All of it was edible.

For a nostalgic Cuban, Jimenez made a green cake in the shape of --- what else --- the beloved island, complete with palm trees, miniature cigars property placed in the tobacco–growing province of Pinar del Rio, and bohios, the thatched–roof huts that dot the Cuban countryside.

Wedding cakes are even fancier affairs. One customer flew Jimenez to Aruba so she could put together a five-layer cake for a wedding reception of 800 guests. Another costumer spent so much on a cake -- $3,000 -- that the credit card company called wondering if it was a fraudulent charge or a mistake.

“They thought it was unusual to spend so much at a bakery!” Said Jimenez, who has 50 employees (for whom she cooks lunch on Saturdays, their busiest day).

Not bad for the wife of a Cuban-exile doctor who to turned to baking cakes because her mother was a great cook and she needed to “come up with something of my own I could do well.” Not bad for a stay-at-home mom who took her first baking class at the old Lindsey Hopkins Adult Education Center in downtown Miami, where many Cuban refugees went for vocational training in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Society maven Nora Bulnes, publisher of Selecta magazine, says Jimenez is one of her three favorite cake makers. The others are Edda Martinez, of Cake Designs by Edda at Doral and South Miami, and Ana Paz, who works out of Doral, North Miami Beach and Davie.

“They make beautiful, quality cakes,” Bulnes said, “Every time I feature a party where any of the three have made the cake. I publish a close-up of their cake. People love it. They always comment on the cakes.”

Jimenez’s secret?

“I love making them and eating them,” she says simply.

The Cuban tradition of fabulous reposteria dates back to the white-linen, high-society days on the island.

“I remember the cakes of La Gran Via in Havana,” Jimenez says of the premiere Cuban bakery of pre-Castro days. “They were fabulous.”

Favors baked in

Many Cuban brides ordered their cakes three layers high. From the cake hung dainty ribbons – as many as the bride had single girlfriends. During the party, the bride would gather around the cake with her friends for a picture and a ribbon-pulling ceremony.

“Buried inside the cake, at the end of each ribbon, was a surprise,” recalls Mayoral, whose family owned bakeries in the towns of Artemisa and Bauta.

Tradition had it that the girl who picked the ribbon with a ring-shaped ornament would become the next bride. The one who got a thimble was destined to be an old maid.

There were several variations of the ritual. Some brides didn’t care for the thimble joke. Some placed a ring at the end of every ribbon to ensure that all their friends got a husband.

While the wedding-cake ribbon tradition didn’t survive revolution and exile – few can remember it beyond the late ‘50s – the tradition of celebrating with a special cake was transplanted to South Florida along with the cake makers after their bakeries were confiscated by the Communist government.

The American influence

It was a natural transition – a return home of sorts.

“Cake-making was something we copied from American culture” Mayoral said. “It wasn’t a Cuban thing. We would come to the United States and take all the latest technology back to Cuba. We were very Americanized.”

Indeed, says anthropologist Mercedes Sandoval, an expert on Cuban culture.

“That’s why Cubans use the English ‘cake’ instead of torta like other Latin Americans,” she said.

What Cubans have done with the American cake, Sandoval said, is “re-interpret it to our culture and made it more elaborate.”

A fancy purple cake to celebrate the feast day of San Lazaro, a red one for Santa Barbara, a yellow cake for Our Lady of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint.

At La Rosa, where the Mayoral brothers have been making cakes since 1968, Osvaldo Mayoral even makes a special cake for the practitioners of Santeria to offer the orishas, their gods. It’s a white merengue-covered tower in the shape of an inverted cone, a sweet offering to the gods in exchange for ache, some good luck.