We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jordan Fry. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jordan below.

Jordan, appreciate you joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

As a former professional ballerina, and now mom of 2 little girls (a 2 year old and 8 month old), my values and business strategy look a bit different at this point in my career. I value smallness. Our culture and world like to tell us that we have to scale and build and make more… but in my current season I have learned that there is value in slowness. I would consider myself more of an artist rather than a baker. Don’t get me wrong, I love cake and really anything sweet! But my favorite part of the process is creating. From beginning to end, something luxurious and unique. Something that can’t be replicated by a machine or another person. I make all my cakes in small batched with the finest of ingredients, most of them I source locally. I then will spend weeks on the details of the cake design. A process that is very repetitive and very detail orientated, however it is something that I find very therapeutic and relaxing. You will often find me working at 1 am, with the lights dimmed, gradually thinning gum paste into a petal with texture and movement. It is quiet work. Nothing hurried or quick. It is delicate and detailed. I occasionally have some friends or my husband jump in to help me, but it is mostly just me! And I like that. I do a very limited number of cakes each year, only taking on the projects that I will enjoy creating and with clients or planners that I enjoy working with. It is a luxury product with every detail thought through and poured into with heart and soul. A one-of-a-kind cake. It has taken me a while to get to this point, and it is different than what most wedding cake bakers offer: usually made from a mix, often they work on multiple cakes a week and it is a cookie-cutter product. I’m interested in the process of creating. Of giving each cake the time and attention to detail that it deserves in order to give my clients the best product I can make! It is small and intimate and tedious, but it is the perfect place for me in this season. The complete opposite of scaling and building and taking on more — I take on less, and charge more, but offer a product that can’t be found in the industry standard.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I was a professional ballerina for 13 years. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, I graduated high school and moved to Pittsburgh to be a part of Pittsburgh Ballet Theater’s graduate program. I spent 2 year there, then got a job with Nevada Ballet Theater in Las Vegas. I spent on year there and then was offered a contract with Ballet West in Salt Lake City, where I danced for 10 seasons (10 years). I started baking in Pittsburgh, I bought a Martha Stewart magazine and made tiramisu cupcakes. They were divine! I fell in love with baking. It was my stress release from the pressures of the ballet world. I would come home from a long day of dancing and bake. I loved sharing what I made with those around me. It was something I loved — creating beauty and caring for others. I also loved that about ballet! There is a lot of overlap between baking and ballet, both are meticulous and tedious. They require great attention to detail, problem solving and dedication. They strive for perfection, but often the perfection is found in the imperfect moments. They have boundaries, but allow great creative freedom within the boundaries.

I ended up meeting my husband at Ballet West! Many professional ballet dancers end up dating each other, and at Ballet West, most of them got married! I continued to bake and bring in what I made to share with the dancers. I was asked by another couple in the company to make their wedding cake. I made I think 12 different cake flavors and brought them all into work and the dancers all choose what flavors they liked for the wedding! It was really fun! Those fist wedding cakes were simple, compared to what I do now, but it was a fun challenge that I enjoyed and I was hooked. From there I made more wedding cakes for fellow dancers as they got married (including my own) and eventually my husband looked at me and said “you have to start charging for these! You spend so much time and money and you aren’t doing this for free anymore!” So we launched Ballerina Baker in the fall of 2017. I was hopeful that it would be something I could career transition into when I retired from dance. I mostly worked on the off season (the summers) while dancing and then when we had our first daughter in 2021 and I retired, I made the decision to stay home with our girls and have Ballerina Baker be my full time job. It was an incredible gift and perfect timing when Steve Moore, from Sinclair and Moore reached out in 2021 to have me create a wedding cake for a wedding in Utah he was planning. I have loved partnering with Steve, and other planners like him, to create luxury one-of-a-kind edible works of art for luxury events around the country. Yes, I do travel with my cakes! About half of my cakes that I do now are not in Utah.
I believe my background as a dancer and my attention to detail set me a part as I bring all of that knowledge to creating luxury wedding cakes!

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Most of my cakes come through planners. Planners will reach out to me on behalf of their clients. When I was first starting, I made appointments with all of the major planners in our area, I sent them emails and asked if we could do a tasting and if I could share my portfolio. It was a lot of work, and I think I did about 20 meetings and only 2 planners ended up using me for their clients, but it was worth it. And from there I continued to build relationships and build my portfolio. I’m not the best at social media, but as far as networking and building a community within the wedding/event industry it has been so helpful!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I’ve had a lot of set backs and many times I felt like quitting. I’ve only had one cake collapse. It was on an extremely hot day and I delivered to the venue where they placed the cake in front of a window where the sun was beaming on it, and the AC wasn’t working. I remember leaving the venue and telling my husband I had a bad feeling. Sure enough, 3 hours later, I got a phone call saying the tier of the cake was just melting and it had slid off. I quickly made a new top tier and delivered it to the venue within an hour. I have never been more stressed. But ever since then I have been learning and pivoting and trying to figure out how to mitigate any damage to the cake. Now if I come across a situation where I don’t feel comfortable I fight tooth and nail to make sure that the product remains in tact…even if that means keeping the product in my cake with the AC blasting until a new plan is figured out! Often with events, it is about being flexible and going with the flow to make sure every product is delivered to a really high standard.     

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ballerinabaker.net
• Instagram: @ballerina_baker
• Facebook: Ballerina Baker
• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ballerina_baker/

Image Credits
Ryan Ray Photography Beau Pearson Photography Kristina Curtis Photography Laura Watson