Angela Logan became a media darling in the summer of 2009 when her Mortgage Apple Cakes, made with gala and delicious apples and topped with butter cream-cheese frosting, lifted her out of debt: the 57-year-old divorced mother of three sons was facing foreclosure on her brick home in Teaneck when inspiration struck.
“I grew up baking with my grandmother [in Atlanta], and everywhere around there, there’s a cake lady,” says Logan. “Whenever someone is having a party, they don’t go to the store and buy a cake, they go to the cake lady. The idea of the cake lady was in my head when I started the Mortgage Cakes.”
Specifically, Logan—then an actress and hairstylist at Nu Loc Hair Spa in Teaneck, and also a nursing student at Bergen Community College—set a goal to sell 100 cakes in ten days, for $40 each. Meeting the goal would enable her to mail off a mortgage payment, pay bills, and qualify for a federal program that could lower her monthly payments.
She advertised the cake to everyone she knew, including her classmates.
“I stood up in my class, which was very uncomfortable, because these were virtual strangers, and I said, ‘Will you help me save my home?’ People gave me money right on the spot. I was baking day and night and also studying for anatomy and chemistry exams,” Logan says.
Logan made her goal, and the rest is cake-lady history: after the Hasbrouck Heights Hilton caught wind of her story and allowed her to bake in its commercial ovens temporarily to speed production, and after CNN, Fox News, Today, and other national news outlets spread the word, she had to quit nursing school in order to keep up with a newly thriving business.
By that August, Bake Me a Wish (bakemeawish.com), a Manhattan-based cake-delivery outfit whose operation is similar to an overnight flower-delivery service, took over production. With the transition came a commitment to helping others facing foreclosure: Bake Me a Wish donates 5 percent of all $39.95 Mortgage Apple Cake orders to GreenPath Debt Solutions, a nonprofit credit counseling service that helps people resolve financial problems.
Logan is pleased to be indirectly helping others surmount financial hurdles. She is also pleased to be sharing in the profits of Bake Me a Wish’s Mortgage Apple Cake sales: “Everything with the house and the mortgage is good now,” she says. What she is less pleased about, though, is losing her identity as the local cake lady. So in recent months, she has set about reconnecting—through the unbleached white and whole-wheat flour, apples, organic powdered sugar, and other mostly good-for-you ingredients that have earned the cakes rave reviews—with Jersey-based friends and family who supported her through her 100-cakes-in-10-days baking frenzy.
“I decided I wanted to keep the persona behind the cakes alive,” says Logan, which is why she now bakes several a week at Zoe’s Cupcake Café in Teaneck.
The cakes are sold there, as well as at It’s a Grind in Englewood and the Teaneck and Fort Lee farmers’ markets; in addition to the mortgage cake, she also bakes apple rum upside-down cakes and pound cakes with white chocolate drizzle ($16 to $35).
“I had such an outpouring of support from this community I wanted to keep the cakes available here,” Logan says. “People remember the story from last summer, and they still come up and congratulate me. I appreciate all that positive spirit.”