Bakery owner creates edible art

Nancy Razo looks more like a punk rocker than a baker - considering her neon red hair, the piercings below her lip and tattoos on her chest.

But her unorthodox style belies her skills in the kitchen.

She can bake some serious stuff.

At just 25, Razo owns and runs Honey's Cakes & Pastries, which recently moved to San Juan after a year in Weslaco.

"You expect an old woman," Razo says, joking that her customers don't always believe she owns the store. "They're taken aback."

Razo, a.k.a. Honey, specializes in 3D cake sculptures resembling everyday objects and often representing a customer's hobby. She describes them as "stuff that doesn't look edible but it is" and uses digital photos to document her work.

A look through her archive reveals almost any object can be rendered into cake form: a goat, iPhone, designer purse, scale rendering of a power plant ... the list goes on.

"If it's imaginable and within reason, I can make it," Razo says. "There's hardly a cake I do twice."

Her work is so lifelike that it's fooled customers.

She says she once made a cake resembling a baseball bat, but her customer simply didn't believe it was a cake. Only when Razo stuck her finger in it was she convinced.

Some of her sculpting is made with a fondant, a sugary dough. The effect is also achieved by layering cakes with supports between each section. She "paints" the cakes with intricate icing designs and an airbrush that releases an edible spray.

Razo often has to get creative when the usual tools of the trade won't cut it.

Once she used a mix of brown sugar and graham cracker crumbs to create the sand for a beach-theme cake. She used square-shaped pretzels to be the windows on a pirate ship.

"I don't have an art background, but I've always been artistic," Razo says.

And since she was a young girl, she's been interested in baking. She got serious about her cakes in high school, when she was short on cash but wanted to create unique gifts for her friends.

But Razo doesn't only make funky, 3D cakes. She also creates elegant, more traditional works, cookies and other pastries.

She says she tries to work with people on a budget and takes pride in her kitchen, located right in the middle of the store.

"Unlike other bakeries, where you don't know what's going on, we're open."

She says she enjoys making the unusual, 3D cakes because people don't forget them.

"The cake is a big part of things," Razo said. "The first thing people will say (at a party) is ‘where's the cake?'"

Ryan Holeywell covers PSJA, the Mid-Valley and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4446.

Honey's Cakes & Pastries is located at 302 E. Bus. 83 Suite 12 in San Juan. For more information, contact Nancy Razo at (956) 781-3600 or visit www.honeyscakes.com