By JESSA PEASE / Staff Writer

PELHAM— Cynthia Bertolone is an artist. Using freshly cut strawberries, decadent cream cheese frosting and a warm chocolate drizzle, she dresses five tiers of spongy cake, transforming it into a centerpiece for any event.

The chocolate covered strawberry cake is Bertonolne’s signature dessert, but her skills don’t stop there. From wedding and grooms cakes, to custom and character cakes, pound cakes or tres leches, she accepts any challenge, and she’ll be selling them all in her new bakery Cake Art by Cynthia Bertolone.

“It’s going to be a great place,” Bertolone said. “There is no other bakery in that area. We wanted to just gift this area, the Pelham area, a good product, a full bakery and a variety of choices and flavors. Hopefully, we get the support that we need from the community.”

The storefront will open in mid-August, or sooner, in the North Pelham Plaza shopping center near Pleasure is all Wine off U.S. 31. It’s a small space, where she plans on starting with sliced, whole, half, round and eight-inch cakes of all kinds and all flavors, to-go, along with continuing her work on wedding and custom cakes.

In time, she plans on expanding into cookies, Italian pastries, Biscotti’s, cupcakes and other baked goods once she has gotten into the swing of the new business. Bertolone and her husband, Michael, formerly worked at Joe’s Italian, owned by his family. Bertolone had been the pastry chef for several years, learning from her mother-in-law, when she decided she needed to expand.

“I just started creating my own flavors,” Bertolone said. “I would get a lot of phone calls because they loved the cakes that I made, and I just needed to expand myself. I needed more room.”

She’s always creating new flavors and experimenting with innovative ideas, and she said moving into wedding, custom and character cakes was the next step, adding that she loves to give her customers more than what they expected. From a simple image off Google, such as the Jordan-Hare Stadium, Bertolone can create a frosting-covered replica for any occasion. What sets her apart is the frosting she uses.

A lot of bakeries use fondant, a “thick clay format” for covering cakes, but she said many people don’t enjoy the taste of it because it is too sweet. She rarely works with fondant and instead prefers using a cream cheese or flavored frosting. The difference is in the taste, she said.

“(Fondant looks beautiful, but the minute they cut into it, it’s dry,” Bertolone said. “A lot of people aren’t ecstatic (about the taste). When I make those cakes, everything is 100 percent all the way around.”

Bertolone, her husband and her assistant at Joe’s, Anna Garcia, make up the Cake Art family, although Garcia and Bertolone will be creating most of the cakes themselves. Michael will mostly handle the customers in the front, but will likely add his special tiramisu to the menu.

“I’m excited, and I’m also scared,” she said. “I know there’s going to be a line out the door.”

For more information, visit Cake Art’s Facebook page at Facebook.com/pages/Cake-Art-by-Cynthia.