To say that Marion Attal makes cakes is a bit like saying that Château Lafite makes wine: It’s an accurate but thoroughly inadequate description. Her tiered cakes, baked with premium ingredients and decorated with flowers meticulously crafted from sugar paste, are a stunning marriage of food and art. They are evocative of the most imaginative and lovingly tended cutting garden and are manifestations of Marion’s lifelong passions. Marion’s company, Mamie Brougitte Cakes, is named after her French grandmother, who began schooling her granddaughter in the art of French pastry when Marion was a toddler barely able to reach the kitchen counter on a step stool. How she went from madeleines and tarte to cakes is a sweet love story.
Raised in France and New York, Marion had her sights set on becoming an actor and was studying theater when she decided to go on a winter break adventure to South Africa. But that short vacation was extended when Marion fell in love with Marcus, who is now her husband. She remained in the small coastal town of Plettenberg Bay for seven years. With her acting aspiration on hold, Marion did what came naturally: She baked. She made cupcakes, whoopie pies, and bars, and sold them at local farmers markets. “The baked goods were popular quite early on because I adopted the value of very good ingredients,” she recalls. “I made my own butter, buttermilk, and vanilla extract.” Inquiries about cakes did not pique her interest, but when customers continued to make requests, Marion started to do some research. “That’s when I found the sugar flowers,” she says, “and I thought to myself, ‘Okay, if I can do that, then I’m interested in making cakes.’”
FOOD MEETS ART
Both of Marion’s parents are artists, and from an early age, Marion experimented with various mediums of creative expression. She sewed and did some drawing, and while she always loved to bake, she did not consider her baked goods “art.” Making sugar flowers, Marion reckoned, would fulfill her creative aspirations, and also give her the opportunity to make cakes that were unique and artistic. She taught herself how to bake cakes, but sought out a mentor who could guide her in the art of making sugar flowers. When Marion and Marcus moved back to the U.S. in 2016, she sought out Maggie Austin, a Washington, D.C.–based sugar flower artist whose clients included royalty, Hollywood celebrities, and the White House. “She’s a brilliant sugar florist who is retired from cake making and now only teaches,” says Marion. She started taking group classes with Austin and still travels to D.C. once a year for private tutorials with her mentor.
Settling in the Berkshires was a “leap of faith” recalls Marion. When she and Marcus moved back to the U.S., New York seemed impractical. How would she source the farm-fresh ingredients that gave her cakes their signature flavor? Her mother, who had a home in the Berkshires, coaxed her here, and it turned out to be the perfect fit. There’s lots of space for the three dogs who accompanied her from South Africa, and she’s relatively close to her mother and sister in New York. Most importantly, there’s an abundance of local, high-quality ingredients for her cakes: She uses High Lawn Farm cream to make her butter and buttermilk; Six Depot coffee is a key ingredient her chocolate cake; caramel sauce comes from Cara-Sel in nearby Newburgh, New York; and maple cream is sourced from Justamere Farm in Worthington.
Marion has been perfecting her artistry for several years and claims that “the sugar flowers were not very hard to learn to make. You just have to learn the basic technique and then practice for a long time. It’s very teachable.” In fact, when we visited Marion at her kitchen, situated in a house in the middle of West Stockbridge, her friend Jenna was visiting from South Africa and had been put to work cutting dahlia petals out of sugar paste. A complete dahlia (one of the most labor-intensive flowers to make) takes approximately two hours.
“I don’t strive for [botanical] accuracy,” says Marion. “I’m more interested in the romance of it—how a petal moves, how it curls, and the shaping of it. Sometimes it can look more like a painting than an actual flower.”
PERFECTLY IMPERFECT
The process starts with a Play-Doh-like dough called “gumpaste,” which is then given a base color with gel food coloring. Marion then cuts petals and sculpts each flower by hand. The blooms are left to dry overnight and then dusted with edible pigment powders, which gives them highlights and dimension. “I don’t strive for [botanical] accuracy,” says Marion. “I’m more interested in the romance of it—how a petal moves, how it curls, and the shaping of it. Sometimes it can look more like a painting than an actual flower.” She draws inspiration from handcrafted and antique objects and “any imperfect creations nature has to offer. I’m very interested in the imperfection of things,” she says. “Usually this type of work calls for delicateness and patience, two things that I don’t actually have compared to other sugar florists. But it leaves room for spontaneity and the beauty of what the material wants to give you rather than how you want to control it.”
Her tiered cakes, layered with soaks of Amaretto, espresso, and raspberry coulis, and filled with various jams and spreads, typically take two weeks to make, depending on the number and kinds of sugar flowers and their level of intricacy. But aren’t the cakes too beautiful to eat? The sugar flowers, Marion explains, aren’t really meant to be consumed. But they can be removed from the cake and preserved (she’ll provide a glass dome to house them) and will remain intact indefinitely, provided they don’t get wet. So customers not only get a delicious cake, but a permanent decorative keepsake.
Premium ingredients and the intense labor that goes into her cakes make them quite pricey. “Nowadays we have a $2,000 minimum, and that’s for your average vanilla on vanilla or chocolate on vanilla with no design,” Marion says. A four- or five-tier wedding cake with her signature sugar flowers starts at approximately $3,500 and can go up to $15,000. The most expensive cake she’s ever made carried a price tag of $18,000. So while her cakes are made in the Berkshires, her customers are typically further afield, in New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut. But she’ll deliver anywhere in the country—a process that Marion describes as “very stressful.” She hand-delivers the cakes, either flying or driving herself to ensure that they arrive safely in their custom-built boxes with plexiglass walls.
For the holiday season, Marion offered artfully decorated sugar cookies (see our cover). “I believe people don’t know how artistic you can get with them, especially because I work in a different way than other cookie artists,” she says. “I use fondant to decorate, not piping gel. It’s surprisingly really good on our sugar cookie, which is more like a shortbread.” She’d like to expand the business to include more price-accessible items while staying true to her brand. “There is a whole world of possibilities when it comes to the sugar flowers,” she says. “It’s been a dream of mine to create a beautiful silk scarf with a print of the sugar flowers on it. This would pay homage to my grandmother, who was an elegant French woman who had a large collection of scarves. I hold that picture of her dear in my heart.”
