We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Teresa Bergfelt a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Teresa, appreciate you joining us today. Can you tell us a story about a time you failed?

Yes. A friend of mine ordered a cake that she wanted to look like a Tardis from the TV show Dr. Who. The plan I had to make the cake stand up by layering the cake and spreading on the icing was a disaster. The cake kept pulling apart as I was spreading the icing on. No matter how hard I tried the cake just kept falling apart. I called my friend to let her know that the cake may not be done in time. She assured me what ever I made would be fine. I did finish the cake and it turned out better than expected.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I always wanted to decorate cakes. When my kids were younger, I would try my hand at decorating their birthday cakes from ideas from magazines. Sometimes the results were good other times the results were OK, but not how I wanted them to turn out. I always wondered how to get such a finished cake like the pictures in the Wilton books. Fast-forward 15 years and a friend of mine one day wanted to take a cake decorating course through the community college. I thought it would be a fun and I really blossoms from there. I went onto to take two more courses and my business was booming. I enjoyed making sculptures from rice crispy treats, using fondant and making flowers with icing and gum paste. My cakes and icing are made from scratch. My customers like the taste of my cakes as well. I keep the cost down by not playing around with flavoring the cake. You get chocolate or yellow cake, which is vanilla or I can add different flavors to the batter, but I like to keep it simple , I like to make my flowers from gum paste because they look more realistic. I have made cakes look like all kinds of things such as tree stumps, cartoon characters, superheroes, etc. If a customer can either describe it or show me a picture of what they want I can make it. I do let them know the more detail the higher the cost, but they are always happy with the results. I also make cookies with very detailed designs. everyone can check out my Facebook page Bergfelt custom cakes or I am also on Pinterest. There you can check out my board cakes I have made. I enjoy seeing how happy and pleased my customers are with my work,

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

The nice thing about cake decorating is if you have a kitchen, you have a business. Once I started making cakes and selling them, the money I got from selling the cakes, I could put that money back into the business and buy supplies to make more cakes. I already had a lot of cake, pans and tips and icing bags and things like that so it was really easy to get started. My family would also gift me things for my birthday and Christmas. As I got more involved with my business and started using the kitchen more and more, it was hard to really get any cooking done for the family so my husband was able to build me a kitchen using 1/2 of our two car garage in our house. So now I have my own bake shop And I was able to buy all my appliances through Facebook marketplace. Using your own kitchen can get you started until you build up capital to expand.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Everyone has their own tricks of the trade. I basically had to teach myself what to do when working with Rice crispy treats. There really are no tutorials for that and you kind of learn as you go. I did notice that some Things that I would try after watching a YouTube video didn’t always work out the way they would show you and then I’d have to figure out a way that would work best for me. You really never know everything and I always like to check out YouTube or take a class if I can or read a book about it or get ideas even from magazines. There really Isn’t one way to do everything and you really have to find what’s comfortable for you to do. But I still like to take classes and read books because they give me ideas and then I can also add certain twists to it to make it fit how I do things.

Contact Info:

• Facebook: Bergfelt’s Custom Cakes
• Other: Pinterest :Teresa Bergfelt

Image Credits

Photos by Teresa Bergfelt