Developing passion into sweet reality

The store’s cakes have been featured in a national
magazine.

By ELISE McKEOWN SKOLNICK

VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT

CAMPBELL — Looking for a wedding cake that she liked and could afford changed Ellen Harvischak’s life.

“The wedding cake that I wanted was way too expensive,” Harvischak recalls. “I thought, the heck with that. And I ended up making it myself.”

That event in 2004 was the start of what she thought would be a part-time cake making business in the apartment over her house in Youngstown.

Instead, she found herself so busy that she left her job as a French teacher at Campbell Memorial High School to make cakes full-time. Now, she has expanded by opening Clarencedale Cake, a gourmet cake and pastry shop in Campbell.

In order to make her own wedding cake, Harvischak took a cake-making class at a local craft store.

“I had no idea people were going to like my cake,” she said. But wedding attendees raved about it, she said. 

“I just fell in love with cake decorating and cake baking after that,” she said.

Harvischak took courses at the Western Reserve School of Cooking, did a lot of self-study and practiced. If she found out someone was having a birthday, she volunteered to make a cake.

In January 2006, Harvischak participated in a wedding show as a vendor and suddenly was bombarded with phone calls from brides. She soon found her cake baking calendar was booked solid. She also discovered she was pregnant.

“I was booked all the way up to November, and I thought, ‘How am I supposed to be pregnant, be a teacher and do all these cakes that I’m booked for?’” she remembers.

In the summer of 2006 she decided that she wasn’t going back to teaching, a job she’d done for seven years.

“As much as I love teaching and as much as I love the kids, I just wasn’t feeling as passionate about it as I was with the cake decorating and baking,” she said.

Her husband, Devin Bennett, is also involved in the business that they named after the street where it began.

A professional artist with a fine arts degree from Denison University, Bennett creates sculpture cakes, such as a lifelike alligator cake and a pirate ship cake.

Harvischak’s wedding cakes have been featured in two issues of the magazine Wedding Cakes: A Design Source. The publisher of that magazine is set to print photos of her cakes in an upcoming book review, as well.

Both Harvischak and Bennett entered cakes in the 2006 Wilton.com Decorate to Celebrate contest. Though they didn’t place, both were featured on the Other Great Cakes Worth Mentioning page.

But that wasn’t enough for the pair. Earlier this year, they decided to expand their business.

“We wanted to do a really genuine, old-fashion, homemade, from scratch, butter bakery,” Harvischak said.

Her aunt was selling the Campbell home that Harvischak’s father grew up in, and Harvischak felt it was the perfect location for her bakery.

The couple hired a full-time pastry chef to work in the store, though Harvischak bakes as well.

The shop, which opened last week at 332 Tenney Ave., offers a variety of pastries and features more than 70 varieties of cupcakes. Harvischak uses only natural ingredients in her products.

“What we thought is, we’d have a nice little business that we could sell pastries to the local people,” she said. “We’ll do our cakes, and we’ll still have time at night to spend with our baby.”

X To learn more about the business, go to www.clarencedalecake.com.