Caroline’s Famous 7-Layer Caramel Cake ready for the Oscars®!

Sitting here this Saturday morning, reading the press release we have just been sent, I could think of nothing more than wanting to share it with all of you.

We have worked so hard at Caroline's Cakes to stay the course and build a strong, tasty, little company. As we move our business to Spartanburg - 'Sparkle City' - from the location in Annapolis, MD, we do so with sadness of leaving 'where we began' and the high hopes of all we can accomplish in our roomy new quarters.

Every now and then one experiences a WOW! FACTOR, and I think that is what we are experiencing here as we send our Caramel Cake out to be a part of the 2012 "Everybody Wins at the Oscars Nominee Bag" and into 35 TV Stations across the country to be shown for their 'show-and-tell' of what is in this particular Oscar bag for 2012.

One never knows what impact something like this might have, but for us, it is fun!  We are just having a great time playing with this little company, coming up with new and sometimes crazy ideas, and getting to know more great people across this great country.  So I hope you are all enjoying this ride with us.  

I know, I appreciate you being there.  What a 'Cake Walk!'

Best of Saturdays,

Caroline

Annapolis, MD –Last summer, DreamWorks production of ‘The Help’ made its debut on the silver screen and was met with rave reviews. Making it’s film debut in “The Help” was Caroline’s Cakes Signature 7-Layer Caramel Cake-  Moist yellow cake layers are filled and iced with Caroline‘s Famous “melt-in-your-mouth” Caramel Icing.

Now Caroline’s 7-Layer Caramel Cake has been selected to be featured in the legendary “Everybody Wins At The Oscars®” gift bag delivered the morning after to the non-winning Academy Award® Nominees, in the top five categories, by Distinctive Assets. “We are thrilled to have the 7-Layer Caramel Cake so close to such an amazing night in Hollywood!” gushes Caroline.   The caramel cake is definitely ready for its close up!

Check out this article from Post and Courier featuring Caroline's Cakes in the movie 'The Help'!

Baker's cake on the big screen in 'The Help'

A bit of beauty pageant mother came out in Caroline Ragsdale Reutter when she learned the new movie "The Help" was in the works.

Reutter set out to ensure her seven-layer caramel cake would get noticed and become the "star cake" in the film, which opens today. And with an abundance of Southern charm, she prevailed.

The South Carolina native, who was born in Charleston and grew up in Lake City, is the founder of the acclaimed bakery Caroline's Cakes in Annapolis, Md., where she and her husband have lived since the mid-1970s.

Much of the bakery's reputation is staked on the caramel cake, an old-fashioned version with burnt sugar icing that takes the better part of a day to make.

Reutter says the recipe itself took two years to perfect. "So I think I'm a little crazy. I could not let go until I conquered it, but I did. But Lord, don't make it on a rainy day."

Reutter first served the cake 29 years ago at her son's christening and realized she was on to something. She says an authentic caramel cake evokes a time when "that special recipe" was a badge of honor for women.

The secret lies in the burning of the sugar, an involved process that she says has been shortchanged in modern-day recipes. The true flavor "would be like patina is to wood," Reutter says.

"It's a taste that people gravitate toward. It brings back memories; I get this all the time. People say this more than they do in church: 'Omigod.' "Word of her cake spread and reached a milestone in 1991 when a financial institution ordered 2,000 for the holiday season. Caroline's Cakes now has nearly 120,000 names on its mailing list, including 7,000 in South Carolina.Reutter, an Ashley Hall graduate, found out that "caramel cake" was mentioned in six times in the novel "The Help" after it was published in 2009. She read the book, listened to the audio and then joined its Facebook fan page.

That's when she discovered a movie was to be made. Reutter sprang into action.

                                                                         'The Help' Cake

The Terrace Theatre on James Island is hosting Caroline Ragsdale Reutter and her seven-layer caramel cakes before showings of "The Help" at 7, 7:45 and 9:40 p.m. Thursday in the lobby. Reutter will meet and greet moviegoers and sell caramel cakes by the slice or whole.

She shipped caramel cakes overnight to the 16 people she determined to be most closely connected to the movie. Then she was friended on Facebook by actress Octavia Spencer, who plays Minnie in the movie.

Reutter next shipped caramel cakes to a book signing of more than 570 people in Greenwood, Miss. The author, movie producers, writers and cast all were in attendance. Her cake got rave reviews.

Finally, she got the call she had been wanting: a prop person asked for eight cakes to be part of the movie.

While the cake isn't specifically credited to Caroline's Cakes, Reutter says she is thrilled just for it being included.

Meanwhile, she is working on a major business expansion in Spartanburg. Manufacturing and shipping will relocate into a 25,000-square-foot building next year. The move not only increases her space tenfold, but the more central location will shorten shipping times."And I got to come home," she says.Reutter, who already is living in the Upstate, plans a retail location there and eventually one in Charleston. Her family also will join her there.

Check out the article published in the Charleston City Paper about Caroline's in 'The Help'!

Caroline's Cakes enjoy a cameo in The Help 

When Caroline Ragsdale Reutter read Kathryn Stockett's bestselling novel The Help, there was one character that stood out to her: the caramel cake. As the owner of Caroline's Cakes, home of the "world's best seven-layer caramel cake," Reutter felt a connection each time the dessert was mentioned. And when she got word that the book would be made into a movie, she knew that her cake had to make a cameo appearance.

Reutter took to the internet to find out everything she could about everyone connected with the film, which follows three very different women who build an unlikely friendship in 1960s Mississippi. She ended up shipping out more than a dozen cakes to people like Chris Columbus, Steven Spielberg, and executives at Dreamworks. Eventually, she hooked up with actress Octavia Spencer via Facebook. Once Spencer, who stars in the film as Minny, tried the cake, she loved it. Reutter then sent her cakes to a major book-signing event at Turnrow Books in Greenwood, Miss., which was attended by several of the film's producers and cast members. Not too long after that, Reutter was contacted by someone associated with the film about providing cakes to be used as props. She says you'll see the cake in a pivotal scene in which the maids tell Skeeter, played by Emma Stone, that they'll help her write a book.

The brief movie appearance is just one event in a series of successes that began for Reutter nearly 30 years ago when she served the cake at her son's christening. Friends raved about it, and Reutter discovered a new passion — not for baking, but for sharing her creations with strangers.

"I didn't realize what I was responding to, but I was responding to those few little minutes that we would visit and delight in the cake," Reutter says. "Hearing stories and memories that the cake was bringing back to people, because this is an over-100-year-old, time-honored recipe. The way I make this cake, not many people have the time or patience or know-how to make it like this anymore."

Reutter grew up making the cake — and many other recipes — while visiting her grandmother in Charleston, where she attended Ashley Hall.

"A lot of people did this recipe because wives were always at home, there was always help in the kitchen, and there was time to make it," she says. "It is temperamental, from the ingredients that go into it to how you handle the ingredients to the atmosphere around the pot as the ingredients are cooked and taken through the process." The recipe is a descendant of a doberge torte, which has strong ties to Hungary, France, and New Orleans.

Reutter started making cakes out of a test kitchen in her basement and eventually moved into a larger space in Annapolis, Md. She's in the process of moving her operations back south to Spartanburg. A retail shop will remain in Maryland, and Reutter plans to open a space in Charleston as well. Besides the seven-layer caramel cakes, she sells five other varieties of caramel cakes (like Carrot Caramel Delight and Praline Cake), as well as chocolate, lemon, red velvet, and many other flavors of cakes and cupcakes.

In honor of the premiere of The Help, Reutter is partnering with the Terrace Theatre to serve slices of her cake to movie-goers on Thurs. Aug. 11.

"I would call this event taking it to the seventh layer," Reutter says. "We always say when we hit something big like this that we've taken it to the seventh layer, and that's what we always achieve to do."

Caroline's Cakes is in Home Town Annapolis! Check out the article!

Local business' cake featured in 'The Help'

Baking a seven-layer caramel cake, a traditional Southern confection, is anything but, well, a piece of cake.

Courtesy photoCaroline Ragsdale-Reutter, the owner of Caroline's Cakes, poses with one of her signature caramel creations. The cake is featured in the movie "The Help," which opens in theaters Wednesday.

Not only is it an all-day process, but outside factors like the weather can quickly turn the cake from a scrumptious treat into a sticky mess, said Caroline Ragsdale-Reutter, owner of Caroline's Cakes in Annapolis. "If it's too humid, the caramel won't do what it's supposed to do," Ragsdale-Reutter said. "There are times when I've ended up with caramel slush."

But that must not happen too often, if Ragsdale-Reutter's fan base is any indication. The Annapolis woman counts Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jackie Collins and Marvin Hamlisch as some of the more famous of her 100,000 customers.Now, the dessert has really gone Hollywood.

Ragsdale-Reutter's creation will take center stage in the movie "The Help," which opens in theaters nationwide Wednesday. The movie, starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, is based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett. Set in Jackson, Miss., it's the story of black maids working in white households in the early 1960s. One of the maids' specialties is a caramel layer cake."There's this line in the book - that when you sat at my grandmother's table and ate a piece of her caramel cake, you knew it was baked with love," Ragsdale-Reutter said. "A caramel cake with good, smooth caramel icing, that was such a badge of honor in the South."

Her caramel cake has been featured on "The Today Show" and The Food Network, but its spot in "The Help" is its debut on the silver screen.Ragsdale-Reutter, a fan of the book, read online last year that DreamWorks Studios was producing the movie. "The caramel cake is mentioned in the book about seven times," she said. "I immediately started Googling."

A spokesman for DreamWorks was unavailable for comment, but Ragsdale-Reutter said she shipped 16 cakes with press kits to studio officials, figuring she might as well try. Her move paid off.  "We got three to five minutes on screen," Ragsdale-Reutter said. "In the movies, that's a long time."She couldn't buy better advertising, said Jack Gerbes, director of the Maryland Film Office."People everywhere are going to want to know where that cake is from," Gerbes said.

A native of Lake City, S.C., Ragsdale-Reutter grew up eating her mother's caramel cake. In 1982, when her son Richard was christened, Ragsdale-Reutter served a caramel cake that her mom brought from home.

"People just started going bananas for it," she said.

Word of mouth spread, and soon Ragsdale-Reutter was selling the cakes to friends as far away as Alaska and Hawaii. At first, Ragsdale-Reutter worked with a baker in South Carolina, Then the baker became ill, and she had to decide whether to continue with the business. It wasn't a hard decision to make."I was just so passionate about it," Ragsdale-Reutter said. "It's a difficult recipe to achieve correctly. But I wanted to keep alive a time-honored recipe that was dying."

For years, she ran the business out of the basement of her Annapolis home, baking the caramel cakes along with other layer cakes - chocolate, coconut and lemon, to name a few. Most of her signature cakes have seven layers.

"Seven really is the most perfect number in the universe," Ragsdale-Reutter said. "Some people make the cakes with 10, 14 layers, but I think that's almost like protesting too much.

"The turning point for Caroline's Cakes came in 2000, when Ragsdale-Reutter got a call from a Palm Beach, Fla. financial services company. Its officials had heard about the caramel cakes from a friend of Ragsdale-Reutter's, and they wanted to buy 2,000 of them to give out as holiday gifts. A few years later, Ragsdale-Reutter moved the business out of her home and into a 2,500-square-foot storefront in the Bay 50 shopping plaza near the Bay Bridge. A year later, she opened the second part of her business, Caroline's Gourmet Take it Away, a catering service a few doors down from the Caroline's Cakes headquarters.

The business really took off around then, said Ragsdale-Reutter's son Richard, now 30 and working for his mother full-time. And the caramel cake still reigns as the shop's most popular dessert. "Even if you combine all our other cake sales - the caramel still just dwarfs it," he said. Like her other customers, Ragsdale-Reutter's high-profile fans discovered her cakes through word of mouth. Veteran TV actress Louis-Dreyfus, for example, is originally from Montgomery County; her mother comes into the shop frequently, Ragsdale-Reutter said. "The celebrity following, it just kind of happens by surprise," said Laura Strawberry, Ragsdale-Reutter's marketing coordinator. "They just find us.