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Tasteful art: Metro Detroit pastry chef’s designs earn her national acclaim

Cristina Huisjen,
Grand Central Magazine

Michelle Bommarito is a Ferndale-based pastry chef who has had a wide range of success in the culinary world. She has appeared in magazines like Martha Stewart Living, Oakland Style Magazine and Michigan Bride, because of her unique cake and pastry designs. Photograph by Courtesy photo
(Click here for more images.)

Not only has Chef Michelle Bommarito appeared on a Food Network television show, but she has also won a $10,000 prize in a competition against the best in her field.

To add to that list of outstanding achievements in the kitchen, Bommarito also won the Wedding Cake Surprise Challenge, when she and four other competitors met the soon-to be-wed couple the night before the competition. The competitors had to create a cake for the couple’s wedding within six hours the next day. Bommarito’s winning cake was served at the couple’s wedding.

The Michigan native competes in many competitions not featured on television, such as the upcoming Chefs Challenge for Challenge Mountain in Boyne City, Mich., which takes place April 25-27. This is a professional competition, and tasting will feature Michigan food products, wines and microbrews.

“I enjoy meeting all of my competitors and seeing their creative work,” she said.

Despite how successful she is today, Bommarito started out like many young girls do – in the kitchen with a relative. She grew up in an Italian family that owned an Italian wholesale market in Michigan. There, she learned recipes with her grandmother and parents at a young age, so it was only a matter of time before she became a chef.

Bommarito has a degree in marketing management from the University of Michigan and began her career in the hotel industry as a sales and marketing representative. All the while, she still loved cooking.

Before long her love for cooking caused her to enroll in a two-week course in bread-making in New York at The Institute of Culinary Education. She then found out the class was lengthened to one month and decided to stay in New York for the summer. Bommarito soon found an apartment and started to work for the culinary school.

After obtaining blue ribbon status at the culinary school, Bommarito became the founder of Michelle Bommarito LLC. And while she spent most of her professional career in New York, she returned to Michigan to plant her business and delight people around the world with her elaborate cake designs: a chest filled with goodies, perhaps. Or a picnic table complete with a basket and food items.

Photograph by Courtesy photo
(Click here for more images.)

Today she is a Ferndale-based pastry chef who has had a wide range of success in the culinary world. She has appeared in magazines like Martha Stewart Living, Oakland Style Magazine and Michigan Bride, because of her unique cake and pastry designs.

Not only does she design and orchestrate wedding cakes, pastries, and special event cakes. She also teaches culinary and pastry courses throughout Metro Detroit.

But that doesn’t mean she is immune to pressure and criticism. Bommitario said that she is always second-guessing her work when she competes, but enjoys pushing herself to do her best despite extreme conditions while competing, like the hot studios and the limited time frame. She’s had plenty of experience with this kind of pressure.

So which Food Network Challenge competition was her favorite?

“Each one has its own benefits,” she said. “Of course, the one I liked the most is the Wedding Cake Surprise Challenge when I took home a gold medal.”

Bommitario believes she won that competition because she was the only competitor that used a design that really fit the couple’s interests. Her cake was a combination of a groom’s cake and a wedding cake. Her unconventional work was rewarded.

For each competition, there is intense preparation in order to achieve success.

“Mental preparation is best. Plus bringing all of the proper tools and items that may be necessary to execute a specific design,” Bommarito said. She also stresses the need to be adaptable to unexpected situations.

Being as humble and pleasing as she is, she says she doesn’t have a favorite client; just that she most enjoys taking a design sketch and making it three-dimensional.

“I appreciate all of my clients and love working with them to design their cakes,” she said.

Bommarito’s favorite cakes to make are “imitation to life” cakes.

“A stack of antique books. A treasure chest. A ‘70s television set. The challenge to create these types of cakes made me realize my artistic potential,” she said.

Bommarito is also an active traveler. She works with a national magazine and flies back and forth from Manhattan to Michigan; she has filmed in Colorado for Food Network Challenge; and she is also working on teaching culinary courses in New York City at her old culinary school. And this fall Bommarito was commissioned to design and create a wedding cake for a client in California.

“The saying is to ‘blossom where you are planted,” Bommarito said. And she certainly has.