Community Highlights: Meet Rebecca Hauger and Mara Hodge

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rebecca Hauger and Mara Hodge.

Rebecca and Mara, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Hauger said they “worked their butts off” to get to this point. Two years ago, the pair merged their respective baking companies to found Geek Desserts. Custom cakes are at the core of their business. However, last holiday season, they found themselves in the center of another trend. “We accidentally fell into the hot cocoa bomb business,” Hodge said. “My business started out as a chocolate business, so I have a lot of background in chocolate. Becca saw this idea when it started to come into the scene. “A hot cocoa bomb is a hollow sphere of chocolate with hot cocoa powder inside. It took off for us. Last month, we were rocking them out like crazy.” The two bakers are reality show veterans, but “Cakealikes” stands out. It is set in a real studio and they were treated like stars, Hauger said. That doesn’t mean the cake was a breeze. “It was so much work,” Hauger added. “It was exhausting and exhilarating. It was so much work — a crazy amount of work.” Hodge enjoys focusing on cakes and chocolate, as the work is unpredictable. She called herself an “artist to the extreme.” “I look at each piece like a work of art,” she said.

A software engineer by trade, Hauger has a penchant for art as well. She uses cakes as her artistic outlet. “It speaks to me,” Hauger said. “I love seeing the smiles on everyone’s faces when they see our cakes. We are hoping to have a storefront. If COVID-19 didn’t hit, we probably would have one. We work out of our homes right now.” Their job isn’t all in vain. Hauger and Hodge donate cakes as “sugar angels” through Icing Smiles, a nonprofit organization that provides custom celebration cakes and other treats to families impacted by a child’s critical illness. “We’ve been doing that since the start of our baking career,” Hauger said. “We do one to two a year — whenever they need somebody. That’s when we get to do our crazy cakes. That’s when we stretch our talents. We enjoy adding to this little brave child’s birthday. It fills our hearts.”

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
The largest struggles have been the huge amount of competition in other home bakers, and breaking into the large, artsy cake industry. It’s hard finding someone to actually pay $10,000+ to have a life-sized cake made of Flavor Flav! The $50,000 was meant as a joke by Mara, and comes across a little crazy? $10000 is a more realistic price for a cake like that.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Rebecca Hauger and Mara Hodge weren’t strangers to baking or reality TV when, earlier this year, they were asked to sculpt a gigantic cake bearing the likeness of Flavor Flav. The couple — baking fanatics who met in 2018 and got engaged the next year, but came to the hobby separately — are the founders of Geek Desserts, a home-based bakery. Hodge has competed on a Minecraft-themed episode of Cake Wars, while Hauger assisted on the “Monster Weddings” episode of Halloween Cake Off! By early 2020, they were looking for the right brick-and-mortar location to take their baking dreams to the next level. But when COVID hit, they pumped the brakes on the search. Soon enough, though, the north Phoenix pair were approached about participating as contestants on a new Food Network show, Cakealikes, where cake artists are asked to create realistic replicas of celebrities. RELATED STORIES 11 Stories Celebrating Women in the Phoenix Food and Drink World Guy Fieri Just Opened Three New Restaurants in Phoenix, Sort of Coming Soon to the East Valley: The Beer Research Institute, Boondocks Grill, and Alton Brown Flavor Flav: the cake and the man. Flavor Flav: the cake and the man. Rebecca Hauger and Mara Hodge They flew to Los Angeles in January to participate but didn’t know which celebrity they’d be asked to cake-clone. After hair, makeup, and a 20-minute rehearsal run, it was finally revealed. “They said, ‘You’re going to be making a life-size cake of Flavor Flav,’ and they brought out three of his famous pictures,” Hauger said in a phone interview with Phoenix New Times. They picked one of the photos and began crafting their Flav tribute. After 14 hours, the Flav replica was ready. In it, the rapper-turned-reality-star donned a crisp white suit. A gold crown rested atop its head. A telltale purple clock hung from its neck. It was handcrafted of sheet cakes, rice cereal treats, ganache, and buttercream. The massive cake stood as tall as its muse — 5 feet, 7 inches — and earned Hodge and Hauger second place in the competition. Flav himself, who appeared as a surprise guest on the show, even approved. “He said, ‘You know what, this is my favorite clock,’ and he pointed to my clock,” Hodge says. “I thought I had made this horrible clock because I had to piece it together in the last 10 minutes — but he loved it!”. With the show wrapped, Hodge and Hauger are back working at their north Valley home, where they bake, sculpt, and frost from a white subway-tiled kitchen.

How do you define success?
Success to us is acting out of kindness and filling our hearts with love each day while getting paid for our passion. Also, being able to give back is key to long term success because we firmly believe the phrase, together we rise.

Pricing:

• Custom Cakes (6″) start at $100
• Custom Cookies start at $3/cookie
• Hot Cocoa Bombs $5/cocoa bomb

Contact Info:

• Email: geekdesserts@gmail.com
• Website: geekdesserts.com
• Instagram: @geekdesserts
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/geekdesserts

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