Sally Mussared is the designer and founder of Mussared design studio creating luxurious handmade silk wedding gowns.

Shaz Franz creates beautiful, special and novelty cakes at Blackbird Cakes in the Macedon Ranges!

Photography by Fiona Handbury of The Garage Studio.

Recording by the fabulous Miss Bella Hazelton.

Time Stamps

00:35 Why Cakes?

00:54 Getting in Contact

01:48 To Your Taste

03:46 Making it Unique

05:18 Shaz’s Fav Weddings

06:30 From Youthful Love

We are here today at Blackbird Cakes in Woodend with Sharyn Franz.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you for coming along.

We’d love to just start with what you do here?

We make celebration cakes, so cakes for birthdays, weddings, parties of any nature. So we specialise in novelty style cakes and beautiful cakes, so that’s basically what we do, we make a cake.

Why Cakes?

Why this? What drove you to make these beautiful cakes?

Before I started working as a pastry chef, I worked in the psychology field, and I always thought it would be great to make people happy, and realised that psychology wasn’t the way to make people happy, so why not become a pastry chef and make fabulous cakes and make people happy that way.

Getting in Contact

Fantastic! I love it! When a bride contacts you, what’s the easiest way?

Either phone or email.

Then what happens?

We generally have a chat, and we always invite our brides and grooms into the shop, and we sit down and have a cup of tea, or a coffee, and some cake, and we talk about their wedding and what sort of cake would suit their needs, and then we design something generally together. They have ideas of what they do and don’t like and we suggest things, and then we design a cake for their special day.

Lovely. And how long in advance do you like that to happen?

We have had wedding cakes on the same day which was quite a challenge, and we’ve done wedding cakes with a couple of days notice, but we generally like at least a month, at least. We take bookings twelve months in advance, probably six months is an ideal time.

To Your Taste

What is the most unusual request you’ve ever had?

We’ve had a few, we’ve made some novelty wedding cakes of a bride and groom in a vegetable patch with their cat. We’ve made science fiction style cakes with Tardis’ and fireflies and things like that. We are making computer game cakes for weddings, and superhero wedding cakes, so its the whole gammet really, it’s generally for couples that want something a little bit different.

That sounds like fun!

It is, it is.

I love it that you enjoy doing individual cakes, that’s what we strive to do with our gowns as well, each piece is really individual and brings out the bride’s personality, so that’s exciting.

Absolutely, you’ve got to tell a story with the cake, and it’s about the bride and the groom, and their relationship together.

Yeah, that’s nice. We don’t get to meet the grooms.

Oh no you wouldn’t.

No, they don’t get to see the dress, so we don’t get to meet them.

We do, we generally do, and most grooms are pretty involved and 99.9% of them love the cake tasting aspect of our little consultation.

Fantastic. What would you say to those couples that you’re meeting, what’s your one biggest tip?

If they think they can put the flowers on the cake, or if they think they can do this, this and this, is… leave it to the professionals, and let us do our job and enjoy the day. Just don’t overload yourself, don’t think you can do everything on the day. You are busy enough as it is. Just take the time to enjoy the day.

That’s nice. So do you take the cakes and set them up?