Meet Bria...
Bria Helgerson, Creative Director, Cake Artist
Bria Helgerson is the creative force behind Flourish Cake Design. On any given day you can find her responding to emails and inquiries, meeting with clients, conducting tastings, sketching cake designs, creating thousands of sugar flowers, icing and stacking cake tiers, rolling out pounds of fondant, piping for hours on end, driving “Dan-Dan the Delivery Van” all over the city (and beyond), setting up and applying finishing touches to her cakes at reception venues, coordinating with planners, florists, and caterers, posting on social media, designing promotional material, and eating cake scraps (for quality control purposes, of course). Whew!
A little bit more about Bria...
With a short-lived background in product design following graduation from Purdue University, Bria started a food blog as a hobby after being laid off from a design consultancy in 2009. The blogging, food photography, and recipe development quickly snowballed into making desserts and pastries for friends and family. The snowball picked up steam after creating a few wedding cakes in her small apartment kitchen for (overly) trusting friends. Eventually, she decided to enroll in pastry school at Kendall College to learn the fundamentals of baking and pastry. Following positions in a wholesale bakery and restaurant pastry kitchens, she quickly realized that cake design was her true passion. In 2014, she began decorating cakes full time, and in 2019 along with Co-owner Cindy Summers, opened Flourish Cake Design.
Bria lives in Humboldt Park with her husband, and their hundred-odd pots of flowers and vegetables on their rooftop garden. Her love of gardening provides a great deal of self-care while away from the studio. Also, growing her own flowers increases her knowledge of structure, coloring, and detail, which inspires her sugar creations.
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Now that you've met the artist, why choose Flourish Cake Design?