Forsyth County NcArchives News.....Sweet Business, Story of Glenda Kiger September 11, 1997
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Keith Redmon kredmon@triad.rr.com March 9, 2008, 5:52 pm

Winston-Salem Journal September 11, 1997
Glenda Kiger can have her cake and eat it, too.  Anytime she wants.

The only problem is, summer doesn't leave much time for such leisurely 
pursuits.  Summer is the busiest time of the year for Kiger's Gingerbread 
House Bake Shoppe, which she has operated out of her home on Edgewood Street 
since 1983.

During a normal summer week, Kiger, 58, will bake and decorate about 25 cakes -
 a few less if wedding cakes are part of the week's mix.  Shelia Baugus, her 
assistant, will answer a deluge of calls.

The season starts with a rush of orders for cakes to celebrate high school and 
college graduations, followed by June and summer weddings.  It is a workload 
that often has her up into the wee hours.

"My Mom inadvertently go me into this, " Kiger said with a laugh, pausing 
between airbrush strokes of a Barbie design on a cake.  She uses a projector 
to produce the images she paints with food coloring.  Her oldest brother 
married into a large family with several unmarried daughters who found out 
about her baking skills through her mother, the late Ida Redmon.

About the some time, Kiger wound up working on another of her mother's cake 
projects - a cake that required elaborate decoration.  Put on a tight 
schedule, she scrambled to find all the equipment and teach herself how to use 
it.

"I ran around to find the equipment, and I didn't have it quite ready" when 
the time came, Kiger recalls, shaking her head and smiling.  "When they left 
with the cake, I called Forsyth Tech to find out when their next cake-
decorating lesson were going to be.  I was never going to be caught in that 
situation again."

Kiger continued to bake and sell cakes as a hobby while pursuing a career as a 
billing clerk for several companies.  Each company fell prey to the arbitrage 
and leveraged buyouts of the late 1970's and 1980's, however, including what 
for Kiger was the last straw: the demise of Pilot Freight.   Her job was on ot 
the casualties.

"I had been decoration since 1972," she says.  "When I went to work for Pilot, 
cake decorating was a side job.   But Clarence Dull at Kernersville Wesleyan 
kept encouraging me.  His daughter is my best friend, and I was doing cakes 
for everybody at church but didn't have the courage to go out on my own."

"They still kept encouraging me.  When the job at Pilot folded, I worked at a 
restaurant, but I really felt like the Lord was leading me to do this. I knew 
the Lord had given me the ability, so I started to pray about it.  I 
prayed, 'Lord, if it's your will for me to do this, show me by bringing in the 
extra work.'"

The work came, and Kiger is still at it today - a survivor of Barney, the 
Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, Star Trek, Super Bowl champs and every other fad, 
trend, sport, and occasion that customers have asked her to turn into a cake.

"If the cake is a birthday cake for children, what's popular is the thing that 
is going at the time : Winnie the Pooh, Space Jam, Hercules," Kiger 
said.  "Barney was pretty big - sometimes I did as many as 13 Barney cakes in 
a day.  I wore out a picture of Dale Earnhardt, too.  But, by far, the most 
popular figures year in and year out are Minnie and Mickey Mouse."

Kiger has baked cakes for just about every occasion and company in the Triad, 
from PTA's and high-school reunions to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and a 
theme cake for a Lee Knard "Good Morning Show" travelogue on China on WFMY-TV.

The biggest cake she ever made fed 400 people.  A local car dealer's joke 
produced the cake with Kiger's record for most candles used in decorating.

"A woman who worked at the dealership wouldn't tell anyone how old she was so 
he called and said, 'I want you to put 100 candles on it.  She absolutely 
refuses to tell us how old she is.' "

But the ploy didn't work.  The employee helped eat the cake and kept her 
secret.

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