Ruby Fogarty at work creating a mud cake masterpiece in her Ōtāne studio.
Ruby Fogarty at work creating a mud cake masterpiece in her Ōtāne studio.
Ruby Fogarty was living in Melbourne in 2017, and her daughter was about to turn 3. Ruby wanted a cool cake for her birthday but she didn’t want to buy one.
“We’d been to lots of children’s birthdays and the cakes always looked amazing. But you couldn’t eat them - they were awful.”
So she started experimenting.
Many experiments later and after a move home to Ōtāne in Central Hawke’s Bay, the self-taught cake-maker - “I’ve largely taught myself from YouTube” - Ruby is a finalist for the Outstanding Cake Artist Award at the New Zealand Wedding Industry Awards.
Ruby is astonished and delighted. She still doesn’t know who nominated her. Her business, Rubylicious Cakes, has only been up and running for a few short years, interrupted by Covid.
Personalised birthday cakes are a popular request.
“We decided to come home in 2018. We were missing our family. When we got here I was asked ‘what are you going to do?’ and I said ‘I’m going to make cakes’.”
The third birthday cake made in Melbourne had been such a success that friends had started asking Ruby to make them cakes.
“I said ‘hey wait a minute, I have to test these recipes first’. I tweaked the recipes and made them my own. The first carrot cake that turned out perfect, I ate the whole thing in three days so I knew it was good.”
While Ruby was a qualified chef and had worked in cafes in New Zealand, Perth and Melbourne, and as a head breakfast chef in a busy Melbourne bar, it took her a while to decide “hey - cakes are cool!”
“I’d worked at the Paper Mulberry cafe in Te Aute from the age of 14, and my boss and mentor Lynne said I had a ‘light, baker’s hand’, and I’d always been that kid in the family that would make cakes as gifts. But it wasn’t until I started to teach myself via YouTube that I realised you either have it or you don’t.”
Ruby's own wedding cake - finished just three hours before the service and her largest creation to date.
Back in New Zealand, Ruby and her husband renovated their Ōtāne home and put in a commercial kitchen. Ruby sourced “Good wholesome ingredients” - organic bananas, free range eggs, Lindsay Farm organic milk ...
“I don’t freeze anything. It’s all made fresh.
“I weather-watch like mad ... I have to swap out buttercream for chocolate ganache, for example, if the weather is going to be hot. Last year I had to do that three days before a wedding, as the temperature was to be 36 degrees.”
Wedding season is massive - cakes take about three days to bake, create, stack and finish.
Near-naked and rustic - very in vogue and currently one of Ruby's most popular designs.
Birthday cakes are in production all year round and cupcakes are constantly popping out of the oven. Ruby makes on average eight cakes a week, sometimes up to 12 “that’s a big week”.
The biggest wedding cake Ruby has created to date was her own - a five-tier statement piece that she was still finishing just three hours before the ceremony.
“I wasn’t stressed. I finished it then I went off to get my hair and makeup done ...”
She is hoping someone else will order a similar cake. “It was so cool, I want to do another one.”
In November Ruby was able to do a workshop with her cake-artist idol Serdar Yener, creating this intricate cake in just one day.
In 2020, Covid caused Ruby’s cake business to crumble.
“In the first lockdown I had to cancel or postpone 27 cakes. I fully refunded them as everyone was so stressed.”
The second lockdown brought more postponements, then Cyclone Gabrielle caused the postponement of a beach wedding.
But each time, cake came back onto the menu with a vengeance. Ruby just keeps getting busier.
In November last year she met her cake-making idol, Serdar Yener, whose YouTube cake art tutorials she had been avidly following.
“I finished two wedding cakes in the morning, flew to Auckland in that afternoon, then did a full-day workshop with Serdar. He introduced me to a new product, his own recipe, that sculpts like fondant but dries much quicker. I’m hooked on it now.”
As if Ruby doesn’t sound busy enough, she’s expanding Rubylicious.
First up are cake classes ... the first class sold out overnight. The classes will run every couple of months but Ruby’s planning to offer them as hen’s dos, birthday celebrations or 21st events.
A chocolate mudcake about to receive its "crumb coat".
Then there is a chance for home bakers to turn out a cake that will impress friends and family: Boxed DIYlicious cake mixes are about to appear in stores.
“People were always asking for my recipes, especially my chocolate mud cake and carrot cake. I won’t give away all my secrets, but the cake boxes contain one or two of them.”
Ruby hasn’t decided yet what she’s wearing to the awards ceremony at Linden Estate on August 18. “But it will have to be something special.”
She has scoped out the other finalists and says one of them is a serious contender. “But I’m not in competition with anyone else really, I’m here to have fun and make people - and kids - happy.
“I started my cake business as something I could fit around the kids ... now the kids fit in around me, but we’re all enjoying it.”
And does Ruby even eat cake?
“So many people ask me if I eat cake. Yeah I do ... if I didn’t love cake I wouldn’t be doing this!”
Rachel Wise is editor of the CHB Mail and news director for Hawke’s Bay Community Newspapers. Rachel has worked in newspapers throughout Hawke’s Bay for 23 years and has covered everything from breaking news to flower arranging and most things in between.
