Inca Sweets
Jackie Smithwick is a native of Lima, Peru. As part of the South American tradition, Jackie’s family loves celebrating birthdays and special occasion events. While growing up, her mother “Tita” was in charge of the “fancy” desserts for the parties. With this in mind, Jackie decided to take some basic cake decorating classes 5 years ago. She would use this activity as her creative outlet, and at the same time, it would help her in the making of her young children’s birthday cakes. Needless to say, she fell in love with this sugar-art. To improve her skills she took some professional classes with leading cake decorator and Food Network Judge Nicholas Lodge, in addition to practicing and teaching herself some new cake decorating techniques.
A new career went on from there, which was making and designing cakes for various special occasions. As Jackie’s passion for this art grew, her husband Dave found it to be a new hobby as well. In August of 2007, Jackie and Dave participated in the 2007 North Georgia Wedding Cake Challenge, from which they took the Grand Prize in the Advanced Division. After years of creating spectacular cake, cookie and cupcake designs, Jackie and Dave went on to their biggest venture yet, which was the establishment of their own company called “Inca Sweets, LLC”. Inca Sweets specializes in distinctive wedding cakes with elegant, handcrafted sugar flowers of life-like gum paste material. Signature novelty /sculpted cakes are the rendition of unique works of sugar art, which have been personalized and stylized for each client. In April of 2008, Jackie’s work was featured in the April/May edition of “American Cake Decorating” magazine. With all changes that Inca Sweets may have seen, Jackie’s main objective will be kept the same – “Helping people to mark a celebration or an event in a very special way, and most importantly, to have fun designing and creating beautiful edible art”.