“Cake Lady” Peggy McKinney

Posted on April 1, 2012 by bob in Features

Peggy McKinney mixes ingredients for her well-known peanut butter fudge cake.

by Lenore Vickrey; photos by Bob Corley

If you’ve been to a wedding in Montgomery in the past 20 years, chances are very good you’ve eaten a piece of cake baked by Peggy McKinney. Her culinary confections have become the staple of many a wedding reception, so much so that she’s earned the well-deserved unofficial title of “The Cake Lady” in the capital city.

Peanut butter fudge mini-muffins are as delicious as their larger cousin, the groom's cake.

It’s an appropriate moniker for a 63-year-old Montgomery resident who lives and works next door to the house in which she grew up in Capitol Heights as one of four daughters.

“We eat most of our meals right here,” she says indicating a long white table in the front room where she is surrounded by cake boxes, cake forms and albums filled with photos of her elaborately decorated cake creations.  The same table doubles as her decorating station, where, despite painful arthritis, she will spend as long as 36 hours to fully ice and decorate an elaborate wedding cake to perfection.

“Fridays and Saturdays are pretty stressful,” she laughs. “All the cakes are baked by Thursday night, and we have to cut all the boards, get the mirrors up and washed, and everything labeled and taped down. I start icing on Friday morning and I’ll still be working on a cake at 6 p.m. Saturday.

“There’s a misconception you get up on Saturday and make a cake,” she says, “ but it’s a weeklong process. We’re a small business, but we work 60 to 80 hours a week.”

A graduate of Robert E. Lee High School, Peggy studied music, specifically the oboe, at the University of Alabama. After she married her husband, Don, she returned home to Montgomery to live near her parents and went to work as a waitress at the Capital City Club after it had been open a year in 1978.

“The customers were good, fun people,” she said. “A good portion of them are still my customers,” she said.

Soon after she began work she learned she was expecting her third child, Karen, but she kept on working and impressing her bosses with her strong work ethic, and soon, a hidden talent got a chance to shine.

“I’d been working there about four or five years, and we were getting our cakes for dessert from a local bakery,” she remembered. But she was unimpressed with their product. “It tasted like a box.”  Although the wait staff had been encouraged to “push” diners to order desserts, Peggy couldn’t do it. “Not when it didn’t taste good.”

She knew she could do better, so she offered to make the cakes herself. “Now not many chefs would let a waitress bake the cakes,” she admitted, but he did. “And that was the beginning.”

She made carrot cakes, German chocolate cakes and red velvet cake at Christmas. One day, she saw a recipe in the newspaper for a peanut butter fudge cake. Not too many people don’t like chocolate and peanut butter, she thought. Although the recipe was good, Peggy “tweaked it to make it my own.” She decided to use crunchy peanut butter for the filling, along with her own recipe for chocolate frosting.

“I tweaked it,” she said. “Well, that just started selling like nobody’s business. People started ordering to serve to their out of town guests.

Today, that peanut butter fudge cake is her signature cake and her most popular.  You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’s not sampled a groom’s cake at a local wedding that wasn’t made by Peggy.

The requests for her cakes grew so great that eventually she had to quit her job at the club after 14 years and go into the fulltime cake-making business. For five years, she used the kitchen at the Vintage Year on Cloverdale Road, owned by her friends Judy and John Martin.  But with no air conditioning, icing cakes became quite the challenge, so she moved into her father’s house and started her cake business in the house next door, where she will operates today.

Peggy and husband Don in the kitchen, photos of cakes she’s baked covering the table. Behind them, cake boxes share shelf space with photos of grandchildren.

Peggy’s husband, Don, despite being sidelined with a severe illness that required a kidney transplant, and knee and hip replacements, refurbished the house over a five-year period. “He did it all by himself,” she said. In January 1997, she got a business license to open as McKinney Cakes. They took out a loan to buy brand new equipment, including heavy duty mixers, dishwashers, large capacity freezers and refrigerators.

And she hasn’t stopped baking since. Every weekend, beginning in March and continuing on through June, she’ll be nonstop baking and decorating cakes. She plots her weekly schedule on a whiteboard hanging in the kitchen, divided into four quadrants of pound cake (the basic wedding cake recipe), strawberry, fudge and red velvet, and the number and size of each layer marked, from sizes ranging from six inches to 18 inches in diameter.

She buys her cake ingredients, including White Lily flour, “real” lemon, almond and orange flavorings, “real butter” and Jif extra crunchy peanut butter at Costco, Sam’s and Publix. She uses 180 eggs a week, 36 in each batter. “I’ve formulated my recipes so I can get the maximum amount of batter in each of my big mixers,” she said. She can bake an entire four-tier wedding cake at the same time in her large convection oven. No toothpick test here: she tests doneness with uncooked spaghetti noodles.

While spring and summer are her busiest times for weddings, the holidays are almost as stressful. Peggy estimates in the past holiday season she baked more than 200 peanut butter fudge cakes, between 30 and 40 strawberry cakes and 15 to 20 caramel cakes over three weeks. “What makes me the happiest is that I’ve been seeing the same people every Christmas, and I think, isn’t it nice to be a part of someone’s Christmas traditions?”

She bakes for individual and corporate customers, including local banks. One loyal customer orders 22 cakes every Christmas to give as gifts. Operating as a true family business, Peggy is helped in the kitchen by her sister, Carol, and with delivery by her husband and her former son-in-law who’ve traveled to all ends of the state to make sure her cakes arrive on time and without a hitch.

Her cake career hasn’t been culinary perfection, however. She remembers a reception several years ago at the State Capitol when a cake in four different pieces was being pushed along on a cart on a sidewalk outside, and the cart turned over in the parking lot. While everyone stared aghast at the disaster, Peggy remained calm. For some reason, she’d baked two extra 16-inch layers and knew she could run home and retrieve them. The cake – and the day – was saved. “And I rarely ever have extra cake,” she said.

Eleven-layer cake McKinney baked for her daughter's wedding.

Her proudest moment? Baking an 11-tier cake for her daughter’s wedding in November 2000, with  each layer a different flavor including cherry, pumpkin, caramel and almond flavoring, all decorated with marzipan and miniature fruits.

Her most popular cake is the peanut butter fudge, but the strawberry cake is the next favorite. For bride’s cakes, she uses a basic cream cheese pound cake batter with a choice of fillings – toasted almond with Grand Marnier, strawberry, raspberry, caramel or lemon cheese. “I am a customer pleaser,” she said. Yet there are some things she won’t do: “I won’t cover a cake with fondant. It just doesn’t taste good. And I won’t do weird shaped cakes. Just square or round, and a few hexagonals.”

If a bride finds a cake design she likes, Peggy will do her best to duplicate it. “I’ve copied so many of Martha Stewart’s cakes it’s hard to believe,” she said. Many of the current designs she gets from the internet.

After more than 25 years, she’s not ready for retirement, she says. She still provides cakes for the Capital City Club in addition to weddings and individual customer requests. Peggy credits much of her success to others. “Everybody in this town has been so good to me,” she says, “the florists, everyone.”

A large board plots McKinney's weekly baking schedule.

She’s been asked to share her recipes, but that won’t happen any time soon, she promises. You’ll have to wait until she has the peanut butter fudge cake recipe engraved on her tombstone. “But that way,” she says with a hearty laugh,  “I’ll make sure people will visit my grave.”

Tags: featured