How Miami local Marsha Daley-Martorano made the sweet leap from business whiz to baker

It was only 6:30 p.m. when Marsha Daley showed up to the Italian restaurant where Oakland Park Boulevard meets the beach, but already there was a two-and-a-half-hour wait. She decided to get takeout from the bar.

A beefy guy in a white T-shirt came up and asked her if she was waiting for a table or spots at the bar. When she said she wanted takeout, he replied: “That’s not the f*** question I asked you.”

This does not sound like the start of a love story, but that’s exactly where this goes. The beefy guy got Daley and her girlfriend two spots at the bar. Food started showing up, plate after plate, the entire menu, it turns out. When it came time to pay, the bartender told her: “Oh, Mr. Martorano took care of everything.”

Mr. Martorano? As in Cafe Martorano? The beefy guy in the t-shirt was the owner, Steve Martorano, who she would learn later, likes to shock people sometimes just to see what they’ll do. He left her his number with the simple message: “You’re beautiful.”

At the time, Daley was working as a financial advisor in Boca. “Then I met Steve,” says the 39-year-old Daly, “and everything kind of changed.”

JUST DESSERTS

Not long after they started dating, Daley joined him at the restaurant, handling the books and helping open his restaurant in Vegas. Servers still wrote orders by hand, and Daley used her biz admin degree from FIU to help her boyfriend modernize.

In her free time, to burn off the stress of restaurant life, Daley would bake. It’s something she’d seen her mom do ever since she was a kid. After experimenting with tons of recipes, Daley developed a red velvet cake that was something special. Martorano sent it out to a table one night, and the customers went nuts. Soon, Daley was making all the desserts for the restaurant. She added a triple chocolate, then carrot, cannoli, coconut, lemon blueberry, strawberry shortcake and peach champagne.

The baker quickly decided it was time to branch out. She called her company Lilly Cakes -- Martorano’s mom and Daley’s grandmother were both named Lillian, and she wanted to honor them.

During this year’s lockdown, Daley spent her days on the next step: a nationwide expansion. It started with DIY kits, boxes of ingredients easily whipped together so people could make her recipes at home, including the red velvet, chocolate and a funfetti. The DIY kits, rather than shipping pre-made cakes, means no stabilizers or preservatives or anything artificial -- something Daley says will define Lilly Cakes.

“It’s a big deal for me. It’s my first independent kind of thing. Martorano’s is Martorano’s,” she says. “But this is something I’m doing. It’s like my baby that I’m seeing come to fruition. It’s nerve wracking and exciting, and I couldn’t be more proud.”