Selomira has been baking wedding cakes and corporate desserts from a kitchen on St Georges Terrace since 2016, and before that from a home oven in Bassendean.
Not a grand plan. More a steady accumulation of ovens, fridges and favours owed to friends with vans.
Naomi Fairbanks started baking birthday cakes for friends in a rented house in Bassendean. The first paying job was a two-tier sponge for a neighbour, charged at cost plus a box of eggs.
After three years of baking at night, we shared a licensed kitchen in Bayswater with a sourdough baker. He had the mornings, we had the afternoons, and we argued about the bench space constantly.
We took a lease on the lower level of Central Park, mostly because the loading dock was flat and the freight lift could take a five-tier cake box without tipping.
An office manager asked if we could do a standing morning tea order for forty people. It turned into eleven offices by the end of the year, and we bought a second van.
Corporate orders were getting bumped by Saturday weddings. We split production so weekday jobs run on their own bench, and on-time delivery went from patchy to reliable.
Four of us, one kitchen, fourteen kilograms of butter a week. We have turned down expansion twice because the work gets worse when the team gets bigger.
Most complaints about wedding cake come down to one thing. It looked wonderful on the table and tasted like nothing on the plate. We think that is a choice, not an inevitability, and it comes from cutting corners on butter, vanilla and resting time.
So we bake on the day or the day before, we use real butter and real vanilla paste, and we do not keep frozen stock sitting in a chest freezer waiting for an order. If we cannot bake something properly in the time available, we say no to the job rather than rush it.
There is no front-of-house and back-of-house here. Whoever answers the phone is usually covered in something.
Started the business in 2009 and still heads up every wedding design meeting. Trained as a pastry chef at North Metropolitan TAFE, spent four years in hotel kitchens before going out on her own. Has strong opinions about the correct amount of vanilla.
Runs the weekday production line and drives most of the corporate deliveries. Knows the service lifts and loading bays at twenty-two Perth venues better than he knows his own street. Formerly a chef at a hotel in Fremantle.
Makes every sugar flower that leaves the kitchen, petal by petal, using a narrow set of cutters she has been refining since 2018. Also handles colour matching from fabric swatches and invitation cards. Calm under pressure, which matters in week five before Christmas.
Keeps the quotes going out, the invoices coming in and the dishwasher loaded. Also the person who answers the phone on a Tuesday morning while everyone else is wrist-deep in ganache. Studying accounting part time at Curtin.
Pulled from the order ledger in the office. We have not rounded these up for effect.
Written on the wall above the ovens. They started as a joke and then got laminated.
If we cannot bake it properly in the time we have, we say so at the quote stage rather than promising and then rushing.
A cake that looks striking on Instagram can vanish in a large marquee. We ask about the venue before we ask about colours.
Real butter, real vanilla, proper chocolate. It costs more and we accept that, because it is the part guests remember after the flowers wilt.
The person who bakes the tier also scrubs the tray. It keeps the kitchen honest and stops anyone from feeling like the least useful person in it.
Weddings and corporate catering are different jobs with different kitchens and different rules. We quote them separately for that reason.
Weddings
Design consultations, tasting boxes and tiered cakes built for your venue. We handle delivery, on-site assembly and a repair kit for warm afternoons.
Corporate
Morning tea boxes, dessert tables and plated sweets for Perth businesses. Separate weekday production line, allergen labels on everything, clean invoices.
Different shapes, different rooms, different problems to solve.
You get one point of contact from the first email to the delivery. Whoever takes your booking is the person who bakes it, and the person who turns up on the day. There is no account manager in the middle.
We send written quotes before anyone pays a deposit. We answer questions about venues we have never worked in before. And if something changes on your side halfway through, we redraw the design rather than charging you for a change of mind.
Some of these are repeat customers. Two of them have booked us four times now.
I asked for a cake for my mother's eightieth and said something like "elegant but not fussy". What came back was a two-tier pistachio and rosewater cake that she talked about for weeks. The team clearly listened rather than reaching for a catalogue.
Rebecca Lindqvist
Repeat customer, Mount Lawley
We use Selomira for our quarterly team morning teas. The invoices come through cleanly, the dietary labelling is thorough, and nobody has ever needed to chase them. That last part is worth more than people realise.
Toby Chen
People and culture lead, Perth CBD
I have a severe dairy allergy and I did not expect a wedding cake I could actually eat. They made the cutting tier dairy free without breaking the design, and the veil of sugar work on top was not affected at all. It did not taste like an afterthought.
Amelia Wrightson
Bride, Claremont
Baking well involves a lot of cleaning, ordering and standing still, and we do not mind that.
Butter, eggs, chocolate and cream come in on the same day each week. We buy from the same two WA suppliers we have used since 2014, which has meant no surprise ingredient swaps during supply shortages.
Before anything gets baked we sit with the sketch and check the colour, the tier heights and how it will hold at room temperature. This catches most disasters before they reach the oven.
Piping bags, fresh buttercream, sugar flowers, a hairdryer for touching up chocolate and a small spirit level. Warm afternoons in Perth do occasionally make an on-site fix necessary.
Ring the bell at the loading entrance on the lower level of Central Park. We will meet you there, walk you through the current flavour list and talk through what kind of cake makes sense for your date.
Tastings run on Saturday mornings and take about forty minutes. You pick four flavours from the current list and eat them at the bench while we talk through tier sizes and costs.
Tasting fee is $35 and comes off the final invoice if you go ahead with the booking. Cancellations inside forty-eight hours mean we keep the fee, because the tasting box is baked fresh the day before.
If you cannot make Saturdays, we can post a tasting box anywhere in Australia. It travels fine and arrives in a chilled pack.