The room that Irma Sosa calls her office does have a phone. But other than that it’s lacking in what you might call the basics of doing business. No computer. No fax machine. Not even a Rolodex.
Instead, it has a four-burner Vulcan stove where a pot of muddy chocolate sits right at the brink of bubbling, a stainless-steel table that’s spread with mounds of strawberries in various stages of slicing and dicing, and walls stacked high with see-through sweater boxes. Only these sweater boxes are filled to the brim with a rainbow of sprinkles and nuts chopped to bits and enough sugary roses to cover a float in some Pasadena parade.
Sosa, hands moving so fast they’re a blur, is decapitating strawberries one minute, stirring oozy chocolate the next. She’s in her glory here, she says. “This is where all the action happens. I love it, it’s like my bedroom, all cozy.”
Sosa’s business card gives her the title Executive Pastry Chef. Her kitchen, the bakery at Marcello’s, A Father and Son Restaurant, is in a strip mall, hard by what’s left of Cabrini-Green. A bank, a bathtub store and a place that sells outboard motors round out the mall.
Sosa, the self-taught pastry chef, does cakes the way another Sosa (no relation) does grand slams: the really big way.
Sweet sculptures
Out of no more than sugar, water and straight glucose, she has sculpted a 3-D baby snoozing in a 3-D crib right down to the dimples on the babe’s fat little mitts (for the top of a baby shower cake), a United Airlines 747 (for a couple retiring after 50 years each at the airline), and a wedding cake that wore the same floppy bow as the bride. She even re-created the landmark pavilion in Spain where one groom proposed to his bride.
“I thought she’d say, `Get outta here,'” recalled Joe Gordon, the groom who had gotten down on one knee before his would-be wife on the granite plaza of Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion in Barcelona. “Instead she said, `Just bring me a picture.'”
Right down to the reflecting pool in front and a marzipan statue at the rear, Sosa came through.
“I just remember my wife had this huge smile on her face,” said Gordon, who first eyed the creation when he walked into the ballroom with his bride. “Irma didn’t just make us a cake. It wasn’t just dessert. To me, what it brought to the wedding was romance.”
That’s the magic of Sosa: the way she sees through the buttercream to the story behind each cake.
When the United couple kept insisting that all they needed was a simple “Happy Retirement” scrawled atop a simple sheet cake, Sosa saw it another way.
“I said, `This is a big deal. You worked there 50 years.'” When they came to pick up the cake, and Sosa walked out of the cooler with the 747 ready for takeoff, the woman burst into tears.
Not all cake stories are happy ones. Last year Sosa got a call from a woman who first bought a cake from her back when her daughter graduated from high school, and Sosa had covered a white sheet cake with white buttercream roses. She made nearly the same cake when the girl got married, and then for baby showers for each of her three boys and always the birthdays that followed.
She hadn’t heard from the girl’s mother in years, but last year the mother tracked her down. They needed a cake for a funeral; her daughter had committed suicide. One last time, Sosa covered a white sheet cake with a bed of white buttercream roses.
“It’s the continuity of life,” says Sosa, barely looking up from a tray of puff pastry squares she’s folding in halves. “If it’s the baby shower, it’s the beginning of something. After that it’s the first birthday and each birthday after that. They come back to you at their 16th birthday. You become a part of the sequence of their life, really.”
12 kids, no cakes
Sosa slides away the puff pastries and walks back to her stove. Picking up a fat wooden spoon, she says, matter-of-factly: “I take it very personal because growing up we didn’t have cakes. Or parties, for that matter.”
Sosa, who is 37 and wears her jet-black hair cropped close to her head, is one of 12 kids in her family. Her parents, who moved to Wrigleyville from Mexico before she was born, worked at the Playskool toy factory in Chicago.
Her father, Phillip, who died of a heart attack the day before Sosa’s 12th birthday, was an assembly line supervisor. Her mother, Teresa, now 69, worked mostly on the Lincoln Logs line.
Sosa remembers her parents driving home in the old station wagon, the back filled with “messed-up toys” from the factory, dolls missing an arm or an eye. They thought they were the luckiest kids in the world.
Sosa, a tomboy who spent her youth on the softball field, never set foot in the kitchen as a kid. Her big sisters kept her out of the way. But, as a junior at Lake View High School, she knew her mother could never afford to send her to college (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
So she applied for a job in the bakery department at the Jewel supermarket at Clark and Division Streets. She worked from 2 until 9 in the morning, mostly at the counter. But she did try her hand at baking bread, which at the Jewel meant taking frozen bread dough and shoving it in the oven, labeling and stacking it on the shelf. She stayed with Jewel just shy of seven years.
From the get-go she was entranced by the seemingly impossible art of turning buttercream blobs into intricate roses. But she never got up the nerve to try it herself.
Then she got hungry, as she puts it. She had moved to Oak Park, but she had no job. And no money.
Walking through a Dominick’s grocery store, she saw a sign reading, “Hiring: Cake Decorator.”
A little resume padding
Sosa, paddling her chocolate, unspools quite a tale: “I actually kinda lied my way into working at the bakery,” she begins.
“My mom had always said, `Whatever you put your mind to, you can do.’ So, mind over matter. I walked up to the manager and told him I’d seen the sign for the job. At that point, I didn’t know how to ice a cake, I didn’t know how to put on a border. … I’d said I’d been decorating for years.”
The store manager handed her an 8-inch chocolate cake, buck naked (the cake, that is). Show me what you can do, said the manager.
“Inside, oh, my God, my stomach is actually turning. I’m thinking, `If he discovers what I’m doing, I’m not going to get this job.’ So, I started icing this cake like I’d done it all my life. I was icing it like my hand knew exactly what to do. My head didn’t. But my hand was dancing on the cake like it had a mind of its own.”
Right down to burping the pastry bag, she somehow showed the right stuff.
She handed back the iced cake; the manager handed her a full-time job with benefits. So strapped for cash she had to ask for a $50 loan on the spot, she scurried through the store, tossing into her cart the bare essentials: eggs, powdered sugar, crackers and canned tuna.
Then she dashed to a J.C. Penney’s where she bought what bakers call the Bible, the Wilton Cake Decorating yearbook, replete with how-tos and photos for everything from filling a pastry bag to piping a frog onto a cake.
She remembers staying up the whole night in her tiny kitchen, cracking eggs, stirring in sugar, trying in vain to scrawl “Happy” on top of a cake.
She stayed at the Dominick’s four years, along the way working nights for an Oak Park wedding cake baker who taught her the tricks of French buttercream, and how to sculpt gumpaste flowers.
She has worked all over town since, from the hoity-toity kitchens at Spago to the stand-in-line Swedish Bakery in Edgewater.
Once, for five months, she had her own place. Irma’s Cakes, it was called. Simple as that. Out in Berwyn. She was living her dream, the scrappy kid who proved she could ice a cake like the best of ’em.
But then her love life imploded. Shell-shocked, and dead-set on giving back what her now ex-partner had paid for, she had no choice, she says, but to shutter the shop.
She moved home, back into the bedroom she’d once shared with two sisters. A couple of months later, her mother told her to snap out of it. She cracked open the Yellow Pages and dialed the first number that caught her eye when she looked under Bakers, Retail.
Opportunity knocks and knocks
That was four years ago, and the guy who answered the phone, Billy Bauer, president of Marcello’s, said he wasn’t hiring. But, after the second or third time she called, he remembers, he told her to come in and talk. He took one look at her portfolio and he was sold.
“I thought, `Oh, my God, this is an opportunity I might not want to pass up,'” recalls Bauer.
So there she is in her office, stirring and piping and slicing up berries.
Some days Sosa flirts with the idea of opening her own place again.
“But I’m getting older,” she says. “I’m thinking I’d like to retire from here. … They treat me real nice here. I get to play. It’s not work.”
And here in the strip mall, she still gets the perk that pays off the most: She walks her own cakes out of the cooler, into the hands of the waiting customer.
“That’s such a gift that I’m given. To see the look in their eyes, from an adult to a kid. The adults become kids again. If I can be a part of that, I think that’s a blessing.”
