The sleepy Lake Erie town of Sandusky, Ohio, seems light-years away from the high-couture runways of Paris and Tokyo. Wendy Kromer has traveled that route — carving out successful careers both as a fashion model and a cake decorator, working with an array of industry superstars along the way.
Beginning in 1995, Kromer was a contributing editor for Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Dozens of her cake designs adorned the cover of Martha Stewart Weddings magazine, and she co-authored “Martha Stewart’s Wedding Cakes,” a book that includes more than 100 wedding cake designs and recipes.
“Wendy Kromer has been making cakes with us since day one,” says Martha Stewart on her website marthastewartweddings.com. “She is so good and so unbelievably creative.”
Kromer describes her style as “classic elegance, timeless.” She attended the Pastry & Baking Arts program at ICE when it was known as Peter Kump's New York Cooking School.
Before her storied career as a pastry chef, Kromer strolled catwalks in the epicenter of European fashion culture. It might seem like an odd transition, she acknowledges, as she pipes white icing through a star tip onto a white, layered cake at home in Ohio, but it’s an artistic endeavor that captures her personality and interests.
“It’s all about texture,” she says of the piping method, popularized in the 1920s by Pastry Chef Joseph Lambeth. “It reminds me of beautiful ceiling details.”
Similar details adorn her Queen Anne Victorian home in Sandusky, where she lives with her husband, Scott Schell. It’s the same house she grew up in. Her parents, Joan and Bob, bought the modest home, built with locally quarried limestone, in the early 1960s. Bob was a doctor and Joan a stay-at-home mom.
Joan was a self-taught cook, drawing from her Polish heritage. Kromer says her mother referenced back issues of gourmet magazines, basing ingredients on those she could purchase locally. "She kept the magazines and pored over them.”
Kromer says other culinary influences included her German grandmother, Celia. “She was one hell of a baker. She drove around in a light-blue Chevy Nova and delivered baked breads and kuchens to family and church friends.”
Kromer's aunt, Evelyn, decorated cakes for birthdays and weddings, oftentimes multi-tiered showstoppers with staircases and buttercream roses.
“She knew how to do all of the baking,” Kromer says. “She was making decorated cakes for birthdays and weddings, and she became well-known in the 1950s. Her cakes were so pretty.”
Yet culinary arts was not the path Kromer followed as she began making her own way.
Stepping into Fashion
Kromer was the fifth of six children in a tight-knit family. In 1983, she ventured to Paris, where an aunt and uncle lived, to begin a career as a runway model. It was a rough start. It took a year for Kromer to sign with an agent, and her initial experience with fashion houses was disappointing.
“Instead of giving you constructive criticism, they slammed your book shut, and out you went,” she says. “It took more of my savings to survive. I had to pay photographers to get nicer photos, but my cousins would encourage me to keep at it.”
Through her aunt and uncle, she got to know a director at Christian Dior, and that meeting opened the door.
“One of the agents who laughed me out a year before in the print division wanted me for the runway division.”
Kromer worked mostly as a backup to the “diva” models, doing trunk shows in department stores and otherwise traveling with the collections. The clothes were pret-a-porter, and the two seasons, fall and spring, led to a lot of yo-yo-dieting — not the lifestyle you’d think a pastry artist might have led.
Still, the experience was excellent, Kromer says, as she hopped from France to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Argentina, Japan and other foreign locales. Architectural details she saw in European cities — such as graceful crown molding and decorative plaster — later led to patterns on her cakes. Her international tastes came to influence her cake flavors, leading to her success as a world-renowned decorator. “Fashion gave you wings to see the world,” she says. “I absorbed everything.”
A Full-Flavored Transition
As she entered her early 30s, Kromer knew her success as a model would not last. She moved to New York at age 32 and worked in the fashion industry for a short time but knew it wasn’t her career going forward. “I needed to do something after modeling, and I loved eating. Since I was in New York, I knew there were some cooking schools there.”
She enrolled at Peter Kump's, now ICE, to take pastry classes, and it was love at first bite.
“I couldn’t get enough of it; I was so immersed in it,” Kromer says. “It was mostly people my age and older, career changers. It was a risk because we didn’t have our day jobs. I got a diploma in pastry arts, and I was able to turn a lifetime hobby of making desserts into a career.”
ICE gave Kromer the knowledge to create the complicated desserts she had been exposed to during her career as a model. Laminated dough, European pastries, chocolate, blown sugar and many others suddenly became doable.
“Here was an opportunity to make them the way they were supposed to be made,” she says.
Working with Martha Stewart
As her cake decorating skills progressed, Kromer looked for opportunity. She landed an externship with Colette Peters, the renowned baker and owner of Colette’s Cakes in New York. Kromer ended up working with Peters for a year, learning how to pipe icing like Joseph Lambeth — now her signature style. Soon after, Kromer won a first-place prize for her sugar showpiece at the 1995 Culinary Art Show.
“Colette was a riot,” Kromer says. “I saw her push the boundaries on style and design. She would turn a wedding cake upside down in the shape of a dragon. I made a Mae West-sized corset cake. I was worried I overstepped the boundaries, but there was a line to see my cake.”
Kromer's voluptuous cake drew the attention of Stewart's magazine editors, including Food Editor Susan Spungen. Kromer began helping with Martha Stewart Weddings magazine since its inception in 1995. Spungen asked Kromer if she were to run with the fourth issue of the magazine, what she would do. Fashion was at the forefront of society in the 1980s. Kromer researched several styles and produced six cakes for a couture cakes story.
Kromer accompanied Stewart on television and traveled with her to photo shoots — and became a contributing editor to the wedding magazine.
“I worked with inspiring and inspired people,” she says. “You had to have passion. People stayed however long it took to make the shot beautiful. You were there to create beauty, and there was no textbook on what was beautiful. I didn’t want to let people down.”
Martha Stewart Weddings magazines are stacked in a shelf in Kromer's parlor, her cakes gracing the covers. The designs are the results of cakes she uses to teach specific techniques to students. Others are visions that she had in her head that she wanted to see come to life.
Returning Home to Ohio
Despite success in New York, home in Ohio called. Kromer and her husband moved into her family home with the dream of turning it into a bed and breakfast. They also hoped to revitalize downtown Sandusky, which had fallen on hard economic times. “Everything near water is prime real estate in New York. It was drying up. I didn't hesitate to move back.”
She opened Wendy Kromer Confections & Academy in downtown Sandusky in 2003, where she cooked, baked and offered retail items. In July 2018, a wind storm blew the roof off the bakery, but it was only a temporary setback.
Now Kromer runs her cake business from her home independently. She makes custom cakes for weddings, birthdays, anniversaries and even everyday buttercream pastry cakes. Kromer is also an online instructor for Blueprint, teaching home chefs how to whip up perfect royal icing or how to nail a showstopper wedding cake that’s fit for the cover of a bridal magazine.
May through November is wedding season. Brides and grooms come to her house for tastings — starting in January — and their vision for their wedding cake. Many clients live elsewhere and return home (like Kromer) to Sandusky to get married and celebrate on the Lake Erie islands. Kromer's husband helps deliver cakes there by boat.
“There are so many different styles,” says Kromer, standing beside an example cake in her home parlor. “The plain, white wedding cake was thrown out the window 25 years ago.”
Practice making more than plain cakes in Pastry & Baking Arts or The Art of Cake Decorating.
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