IF YOU GO
Place: Sweet Touch Cake Studio.Address: 13304 SW 133rd Ct., Kendall (next to Tamiami Airport).Contact: 786-242-5503, nhoradelapava.com.Hours: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Saturday.Prices: Small cakes start at $55; large, multitiered ones at $1,000. Classes are $500 for a one-day private session, $85-$100 for groups (limited to six per class).Nhora de la Pava is an artist who has chosen sugar as her medium and cake as her form. Each is a labor of love, made in her Kendall studio, Sweet Touch, where she also teaches classes in cake design and decoration.
Cakes in plastic display boxes are scattered about the small front space -- topped with sculpted sugar figurines, splattered with Art Deco imagery or tied in sugar bows. A woodland cake is topped with Winnie the Pooh and Tigger. A multitiered model is covered in stars and crowned with a crescent moon. Another resembles a Royal Doulton tea set.
Customers can choose a real, edible cake or a ''blank'' covered in smooth rolled fondant that will last for years. (One woman keeps her five-foot high, $80,000 wedding cake under glass, De la Pava reports.) Intricate tiered cakes start at $1,000.
A native of Cali, Colombia, De la Pava earned a degree in fine art and planned to become a commercial artist, but her hobby turned into a business after she and her husband, Hugo, emigrated to Miami in 1980. Her first major creation was a first-birthday cake for her son Pablo, who now helps her with Sweet Touch.
She has won numerous awards including ''people's choice'' in a Brides magazine ''cakewalk'' at Grand Central Station in New York, a gold medal from a British sugar craft guild and first place in a global wedding cake competition.
Fondant -- a pliable, almost fabric-like mixture of confectioners' sugar, tylose (a binder), glucose and vegetable shortening -- is the foundation for her cakes. The word is from the French fondre, meaning ''to melt,'' and confection not only melts in the mouth, but can melt in high humidity, so her studio is well air-conditioned.
To make sugar blossoms, she rolls fondant through a pasta-making machine into thin sheets, cuts petals, rolls them thinner yet with a mini rolling pin, then presses the petals on a mold to give them veins. She uses the pasta machine to make ribbons, too, often brushing on pearl dust for satiny sheen.
The edible cakes are soaked in rum so they stay moist under a mantle of fondant -- but most people can't bear to cut into the exquisite artwork.
Linda Bladholm's latest book is Latin and Caribbean Grocery Stores Demystified.
