Yours Truli

Nina Asadoorian is the Northeast's Ace of Cakes.

by Tara Mataraza Desmond

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Published: Mar 28, 2007

HAUTE CAKE: A Truli Confectionary creation. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Past the galleries on Second Street, and beyond the installations at the Painted Bride, resides an artist who makes her living painting for brides. Philly native Nina Asadoorian is the owner and executive chef of Truli Confectionary Arts, a custom cake bakery with so many couture offerings, it might as well be a gallery.

Asadoorian discovered her interest in art as a teenager, but her business-minded parents didn't encourage it. She spent nearly three years at Villanova before transferring to Parsons School of Art and Design in Manhattan. After graduation, she worked as a makeup artist, painting the faces of stars for music videos in Los Angeles, until her bank account dried up and she could no longer resist her father's plea to come home. She moved back and joined Rillings Bakery, her family's now-14-year-old business that sells both retail and wholesale goods in Northeast Philly.

One weekend, with several wedding cakes on the docket, Rillings' cake decorator called out with a broken leg. "This was no time to say I don't know what I'm doing," recalls Asadoorian, who dove in and made the cakes. Right then, her future calling started to unfold like a smooth piece of fondant.

She immersed herself in learning the trade. "I was driving home from a class in Lancaster with a grin from ear to ear," says Asadoorian. "I knew this was exactly what I wanted to do." Soon after, she set up Truli Confectionary Arts within Rillings.

When you see Asadoorian work, you immediately search for a word other than "cake" to describe it. She combines color, design, shape and texture to bring her haute handiwork to life. Her range is inexhaustible — from an elegant, four-tiered, white-on-white wedding cake adorned with gum-paste orchids to one designed to resemble a bucket of crabs, complete with a beer bottle, french fries and mallet — and yet totally edible. Her workshop is a cross between a craft store and a commercial bakery. Pencil sketches of new cakes are taped to a cabinet. When I visited, the lineup included a BlackBerry device; a birthday cake for a nun named Sister Anne, which featured a cooler stocked with Coors Light and Diet Coke; and a jewelry box that opened to reveal a diamond ring and the words, "Will you marry me?"

"There's really nothing we won't do," says Asadoorian. "We love to be challenged." The most time-intensive cake she remembers involved 30 gum-paste roses, which she banged out at a mind-numbing speed of two per hour.

Asadoorian finds inspiration everywhere: in art, architecture, fashion magazines, fabrics and stories from clients. And it may come as a surprise, but her cakes taste as good as they look. Her favorite combinatons include chocolate fudge cake with macaroon filling and caramel drizzle; banana cake with caramelized bananas, Bavarian cream and caramel buttercream; and devil's food cake with chocolate ganache and espresso buttercream.

"In the beginning I was doing these cakes for next to nothing, just to get noticed," says Asadoorian. Nowadays, her price varies between $6 and $12 per person (compared with about $2 per person for a more traditional cake made by her parents' bakery). Many orders come from patrons of Philadelphia's luxury hotels, and The Four Seasons selected Truli as its exclusive special-events vendor. Even Food Network and the Today Show have called. Perhaps most notably, Asadoorian swept the 2005 Let Them Eat Cake competition, a benefit for City of Hope, where fellow contestants included 19 local pastry chefs. She'll be back for the event again this month. Lucky for us, Asadoorian's palate is also our plate.

Truli Confectionary Arts, 2990 Southhampton Road, 215-856-9206, www.truliconfectionaryarts.com

 

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