For Sean Allen, whose liqueur-infused cakes have earned him the nickname Cake Bartender, every bar tab counts. That’s because Allen, who lives and bakes in Redondo Beach, finds inspiration for his creations in cocktails.
“I go out drinking socially and I make a note of what people are drinking,” he said. “I buy the bartending books and I get all the magazines women get and look at the drinks they’re drinking, and I walk up and down the aisles of BevMo to see what liquors they’re coming out with.”
He makes mental notes, and then he summons them later when he’s in his kitchen-cum-laboratory.
“I’m like a mad scientist, mixing all this stuff,” he said. “I ask people what they like to drink, I think of desserts I used to eat as a kid, and it all comes together.”
Allen is the smiling face behind Cake Buzz, a business that asks its customers to “have their cake and drink it, too!” and whose Yelp reviews Allen admits are “so good they’re almost X-rated.”
This month, The Cake Bartender will appear on national television. He’s a contestant on Supermarket Superstar, a Lifetime series that premieres Monday, July 22 and pits home chefs against one another in a race to land his or her product on the shelves of nationwide supermarket chain A&P.
Hosted by wrestler and model Stacy Keibler and featuring Debbi Fields of Mrs. Fields Bakeries, celebrity chef Michael Chiarello, and branding expert Chris Cornyn, the show offers its winner $10,000 in prize money, $100,000 in product development funding from DINE Marketing and Mattson, and the opportunity to become a household name.
When Allen auditioned for Supermarket Superstar last year, the network liked his product and his story, labeling him a “longshoreman who likes to party.”
“As the tension heats up in the kitchen,” reads the network’s marketing spiel, “one cook discovers that while he likes his cognac cake to be a dessert and drink in one, not everyone wants to get buzzed!”
The cake Allen is taking to the big screen is a cognac butterscotch cake.
“People lose their minds about this one on Yelp,” he said, laughing. ““I call it crack cake; you get hooked and you’ll come back for more.”
The crack cake joins a lineup of 500 creative cakes, each pinned with an equally creative name.
Allen has a cake called Interracial Relationship, which incorporates three different colors of alcohols; a chocolate cake infused with Kahlua, Baileys, Courvoisier, and almond tequila called Bald Headed Colored Guy; a tequila, Stoli, and redberry vodka strawberry cake called Cute Toes; and a Bacon & Eggs cake infused with bacon vodka, eggnog liqueur, and Crown Royale maple.
Yelp reviewers pepper Cake Buzz synopses with such words and phrases as “phenomenal” and “a taste of heaven” and “ridiculously good,” and call Allen “a wizard” and “an artist” and “a genius.”
Allen attributes his affinity for baking – and the meticulousness with which he approaches it – to his late mother. A single mother of three boys and three girls, she couldn’t afford the waste that often results from culinary experimentation, so taught herself to be an efficient baker who knew measurements by sight and recipes by heart.
“She never wrote anything down,” Allen remembers. “She never used measuring cups. She had a basic pound cake recipe out of an old book but she kinda just took the gist of it and made it her own. I never really saw her use the book.”
It was that precision in the kitchen, and the way it always led to mouthwatering results, that Allen remembers as one of his mother’s strengths.
“A lot of people just eat to fill the void and they don’t really savor their food… I’d go over to my friends’ houses and their mothers or fathers couldn’t cook as well. I kept thinking, ‘This is weird,’ and I was like, ‘Mom, you gotta show me how to cook like you do.’”
She imparted what kitchen knowledge she could before she died in 2005. By that time, Allen was working as a longshoreman in the Port of Long Beach, living in Redondo Beach, and raising a son.
B right after she died, as a kind of tribute to her, Allen made a cake of his own – a cross between a rum cake and a pound cake with butter frosting.
“A lot of my friends came over and tasted it and started pushing me to sell this cake, and I was like, ‘I’m a longshoreman!’ But they kept pushing,” he remembered.
Then, at the height of the recession in 2009, Allen lost his steady job. For him, the obvious fallback was baking. He just didn’t realize at the time how lucrative a fallback it would become.
At first his fledgling business limped along; his savings went into purchasing bulk cake ingredients and paying rent, and there wasn’t a whole lot left over. He had to learn to be efficient with the time and money he spent baking.
“My mother didn’t experiment with foods because when you do that you end up wasting a lot of stuff. She had six kids and no room to waste anything; she knew exactly what she was doing. So I try to do the same thing. Sometimes before I create a cake I’ll mix its flavors in a drink – if I don’t think it tastes good, well, I just drink the cocktail, but if I think it’s going to work I’ll expand.”
After spending time perfecting his cakes and offering them up for taste tests in his social circles, Allen had a feeling he was onto something and turned up the marketing heat. He joined multiple Chambers of Commerce, started funneling money into hosting fundraisers, churned out social media content, and reached out to celebrities to ask for their help with brand promotion.
That’s when things really started to take off. While he’s enjoying an overwhelming influx of orders, he’s still humbled by the opportunity to go on national television.
“With the economy we’re in, people are struggling,” he said. “I have the greatest appreciation for the Lifetime producers for trying to shine light on us, giving people a chance to bring what they’ve worked so hard for in their kitchens to the supermarket. They’re giving the impetus and encouragement and hope to people out there who might have an idea.”
