Cake Talk

Don't Bet the Bakery on a Cake

Every so often we're reminded of the legal issues involved in reproducing copyrighted and/or licensed characters (such as Mickey Mouse or Dora).

So what's the big deal? There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of photos of character cakes online, and the majority of them are probably illegal.

Here's the bottom line... if we got sued, the legal fees alone would put us out of business. And while the risk of being sued may seem small, I'm not willing to bet the bakery on it.

So, Mary's Cakes & Pastries is unable to make cakes using licensed characters unless a written copyright release has been received from the copyright owner. This includes cakes made from shaped pans, carved cakes, and cakes with the likeness of licensed characters drawn on them.

It is a violation of Federal Copyright Law for a cake decorator to decorate any product they SELL with an identical copy or close likeness of copyrighted movie, TV, cartoon, or comic book character without permission of the copyright owners. To do so can cost the decorator AND the customer a great deal of money for damages under the law. Penalties range from $200 to $150,000 or more. As an individual making cakes privately at home for your own family and friends -- WHERE ABSOLUTELY NO MONEY CHANGES HANDS, EVEN TO COVER EXPENSES -- you can do whatever you want. But the law does apply to us, a bakery trying to make a profit from the cakes we make and decorate. It also applies to any private individual who accepts any amount of money for their creations.

(If you need a cake with licensed characters, skip to the bottom of this post to read about your options.)

There are three issues involved here... The law itself, and the two major exceptions to the law.

Copyright and Intellectual Property

Copyright gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, or "the right to copy." It also gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, and other related rights.

Generally, creating any type of image that looks like a licensed or copyrighted character that is sold for commercial purposes is prohibited unless there is a specific licensing agreement, with two major exceptions.

First Sale Doctrine

The First Sale Doctrine is an exception to the copyright law. After the first sale of a particular object that embodies a copyrighted work, the copyright owner's rights are exhausted and the copyrighted object is free to flow in the stream of commerce. The doctrine allows for resale of the copyrighted object. It is important to note, that the First Sale Doctrine does NOT get around the copyright owner's exclusive right to make reproductions or derivative works.

In the cake world, a baker can purchase a cake pan from a copyright owner (or authorized distributor) and then later sell that same cake pan to another person without violating the copyright owner's exclusive rights. However, the First Sale Doctrine does not allow a baker to purchase a cake pan from a copyright owner (or authorized distributor), use the pan to create the copyrighted characters' likeness, then sell that character cake to a third party. The sale of the character cake deprives the copyright holder of its exclusive right to reproduce and prepare derivative works of the copyrighted object, as well as their exclusive right to distribute the work to the public.

Licensed pans cannot be rented to consumers by stores since the licensor is not earning a royalty from the transaction. 

We have never used licensed pans at the bakery, but do offer them for resale in the consignment shop. Any bakery, private baker or decorator that sells cakes made from these pans is breaking the law.

Fair Use

Fair use is the other major exception in copyright which allows use of copyrighted materials without obtaining permission as long as the use can be considered fair. There is a four-factor analysis which must be applied to each use to determine whether the use is fair.

1. Purpose and character: generally whether or not a profit is made from use of the work.
2. The nature of the work: creative works have more protection than factual ones.
3. The amount of the original work being used.
4. The market effect, or how the use impacts the market for the original work.

Each factor is given equal weight. The goal is to achieve a balance between the rights of the copyright holder with the rights of the public. Fair use is also technologically neutral so the same analysis may be applied to any medium. There is an excellent and detailed description of the fair use exception on Perdue University's website.

I am not an attorney, but I can see both sides. In a bakery, the ultimate use is for profit (theoretically at least...). But I would argue that its use on a cake for a private birthday party has no major impact on the general market for the artwork. However then there is the perspective of the companies that buy the license and make the plastic figures for cakes (and mainly sell them to large bakeries and grocery stores). If a customer is not allowed to buy a from-scratch and well decorated cake from a bakery like ours, then they have to buy the licensed product from them. So, from their perspective we DO impact the market. Of course the flip side to that argument is that most of our customers don't want the cheap plastic licensed figures and won't not a grocery store cake. Some will go purchase a figure on their own and bring it to the bakery for us to use, but many will just find someone else willing to break the law so they can have a lovely and delicious cake with the decorations they want. Hence, the dilemma. 

Options:

If you want to buy a cake with licensed characters you have two legal options:

1. Contact the copyright owner to obtain a release for the one time use, IN WRITING. This may take some time and be very expensive.
2. Purchase a licensed cake design or figure and bring it into the shop. We will stock a limited number of the most popular items (Dora, Mickey Mouse, Elmo, Hello Kitty and Spongebob), but are happy to put any item you bring into the bakery on your cake and decorate around it.

When searching online for ideas for your cake, you will run across countless galleries from bakeries with beautiful licensed character cakes. At the risk of sounding redundant, these cakes were either made with the copyright release which can run in the thousands of dollars, made for display purposes only, or made without the copyright owners consent (illegally).

So please don't ask us to break the law and put the bakery at risk. There are several extremely creative people working at Mary's Cakes & Pastries. I'm sure we can come up with an original and LEGAL way to decorate your cake.

 

Breaking the Law?

Nobody's looking, would you steal that candy bar?

Of course not, it's against the law and morally wrong.

What about intellectual property? Would you buy a pirated version of your favorite movie or song?

You might think a bit longer about this, but it's still against the law and morally wrong.

So how about asking the cake decorator at your local bakery to draw a licensed and/or copyrighted character -- such as Mickey Mouse, Dora or Hello Kitty -- on a cake?

There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of photos of character cakes online, and the overshelming majority of them are illegal.

We get asked all the time -- I MEAN MORE THAN ONCE PER DAY -- to recreate a copyrighted and licensed character on a cake or cookie.

What should we say?

Please help us gather our thoughts about this by commenting.

 

 

Pain d'Epi

Pain d'Epi

Epi Bread.

Wheat Stalk Bread.

Whatever you call it, it's a classic (French) artisan bread you can make from baguette dough, or just about any other bread dough. You simply roll a baguette shape, cut almost through at an angle with scissors, and separate the cut parts. There is a great blog post about forming and cutting a pain d'epi on Bread in Five.

Pain is the French word for bread (yeah, I know you already know that). Épi translates directly as "ear" but is short fo épi de blé, means "sheaf of wheat".

Way back in culinary school, I made this sheaf of wheat from salt dough as a decoration for a wedding buffet. Why? Oh, very symbolic.

A sheaf of wheat represents the prosperity of a bountiful harvest. To early agricultural people, a good wheat harvest assured plenty of the bread that would keep the community alive throughout the winter. Wheat sheaves became symbols of the successful harvest, associated with all that is truly nourishing and life-affirming. 

It is also a symbol of death, resurrection and fertility.  ‘I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.’ (John 12:24) It is used af funerals to symbolize the fruitful and productive life of a person of faith.

And it was the advent of the Wedding Cake.

In ancient Greece and Rome, wheat was a symbol of fertility and prosperity. Early Roman wedding guests tossed grains of wheat at the bride and groom for good luck and fertility.

As customs evolved, guests would bring small wheat cakes to the ceremony and crumble the cakes over the bride's head, symbolizing the same gifts of fortune and fertility. They would then eat the fallen crumbs to share in the young couple's good fortune.

Later, wheat cakes were stacked in a tall mound between the bride and groom, and if they were able to kiss over the stack, they would be blessed with many children and much prosperity. Today’s traditional French wedding cake, the croquembouche -- a tall pyramid of profiteroles held together with spun sugar – evolved from this custom.

Getting back to the epi bread, Wise Geek describes it as "easy and stylish." Yep, that's about it. It is like several rolls bound together along a central stalk. It looks cool, and it is easy to eat -- you just break a piece off.

And if you happen to like crust (which is MY favorite part of the bread), you'll be in heaven!

We made some today with rustic sourdough, which was a little dry. We might have to do it again tomorrow with a softer dough (one with a higher percentage of water).

Half Swiss

My mother's family is Swiss, from the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino. With family names like Tomasini and DeMartini, there is no hiding the Italian heritage. My great grandfather changed his last name to DeMartin when he first arrived in the U.S. in 1892. He became an American citizen in 1898.

As children, my brothers, sister and I used to crawl onto grandma's lap while she told stories about her family's visit to Switzerland just before World War I, and how they got stranded there during the war.

Grandma arrived in Switzerland with her family late in 1913. She was barely 10 years old, and this was her first time traveling outside California. The family intended to stay in Switzerland about a year. Her youngest brother got sick and died of diptheria while they were there. Then her mother became pregnant, and the visit was prolonged.

At the time, American citizens were not required to hold passports for travel and no member of her family had a passport. But when the U.S. entered the war in 1917, passports became a requirement for entry into the United States.

Food was becoming scarce in Europe and even neutral Switzerland was not a safe place for a large American family. They desperately wanted to return home to California. My great-grandfather traveled to Zurich to apply for passports for himself, his wife, and their five children, submit two photos of each family member, and wait until everything could be verified and passports issued before they could travel home. He had no proof of his American citizenship, and his passport application relied on his sworn statements, and promise to use the documents immediately for the singular purpose of returning to the United States.

Waiting for passports, they split their time between Locarno, on the Lago Maggiore, and the tiny alpine village of Brontallo, high in the Valle Maggia, staying with relatives until December 1917. We pictured a life as described in the children's classic, Heidi, by Johanna Spyri.

Once they got passports, they immediately traveled by train to the Port of Bordeaux. Women and children were not allowed off the train during station stops, and every window in every compartment was permanently shuttered. She later learned from her father and brother that passing trains carried dead soldiers from the front.

The family spent a night in Bordeaux before boarding the steamship Rochambeau en route to New York. They ate dinner in a cafe near the harbor, their first restaurant meal in over a year. As her father got up to pay the bill for his table of seven, the cafe owner pointed to the American soldiers standing outside the restaurant and simply said "merci."

A short two years after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, and five years after the Titanic disaster; the large family feared separation should the ship be struck by a mine or torpedo (a very real possibility). Grandma, at 14, was the oldest of the children, and the only one privy to the pact made by her parents to stay together in their cabin should the bells sound and women and children be ordered onto lifeboats.

As the story goes, the ship zig-zagged the harbor to avoid mines before crossing the Atlantic. Every time she told this part of the story, she gave these details no less significance than the description of fresh apples and oranges in barrels on the deck. "You could just take them, as many as you wanted!" she always told us as if she were still in awe. Fresh fruit (in fact, food of any kind) had been scarce during their extended stay in the Swiss Alps.

On every visit to Switzerland, first with my grandmother in 1975, and several times since, we made the trek up the alps to Brontallo for a family meal that always included polenta. Similar to grits, polenta is slightly coarser in texture and once it’s cooked, it can be cooled, cut into shapes and grilled or fried. It is often cooked over an open fire in a cast iron or heavy copper pot.

When served to us as guests by our Swiss relatives, it is accompanied by a beef and tomato stew, but grandma remembered it plain for breakfast, or with a ragout made from mushrooms and herbs foraged in the woods.

Some people make polenta with milk or chicken stock as the liquid, but I always remember it with just water and salt. Here is a link to a traditional polenta recipe.

And it's OK that it sticks to the pot. I remember fighting with my cousins over the crispy bits you peel off the pot before you wash it.

Buon Apetit!

How Bakers Play

I got to play with bakers today and it was really fun!

The Southeast Retail Bakers Association and Dawn Food Products hosted a seminar in Georgia.

This is Adam (one of the bakers at Dawn Food Products), showing us how to make biscotti from a basic recipe, while changing out the flavors. Chocolate (with white chocolate chips and sliced almonds). Cherry Cordial. Lemon. Almond. Trail Mix. Several new flavors to add to our already popular Orange-Cranberry with Pistachios.

Then we learned how to mix fruit flavors with chocolate to dip them. Then dip them in lots of add-ons like chopped nuts and chocolate curls.

They will be in the bakery soon. Maybe even Tuesday.

Then we played with bread dough. I learned how to make a rolled bread with our baguette or ciabatta dough, filled with spinach and cheese. They use a really cool starch to keep the filling from getting runny and messy while you roll the breads. Larry (also from Dawn Food Products) and Aaron (who owns a bakery in South Carolina) had a great time seeing who could spread the filling fastest (yeah, that's what we do...).

And I learned how to make some cool shaped breads. We made epi bread (I didn't take a photo of mine, so this is a generic one to show you what an epi bread looks like), learned a six-braid for challah, and how to make knotted rolls.

Then we had "show and tell." I brought our Hunger Games inspired bread recipe to share with the others. One brought a doughnut stuffed with sausage and topped with maple glaze (we can't make them because we don't have a fryer); another brought cheese & jalepeno bread (that one has potential). One lady shared a gift basket idea -- the ribbon had the name of her bakery printed on it.

As if all that wasn't enough, I came home with lots of samples, and some nice dough dividers (that double as icing smoothers) and oven mitts.

Except for almost getting a speeding ticket (FYI, the speed limit between Talladega and the Georgia state line is 55 mph, and it is strictly enforced, even on Sunday at 6 a.m.) -- the highway patrolman took pity on me and let me off with a warning -- it was a good day.

Our strawberry gelato has a provenance.

prov·e·nance:
noun.  the history of ownership of a valued object or work of art 

Yep. Gelato can have a provenance. Doesn't it look delicious?

These are the strawberries. THE strawberries.

All we added to get to gelato was some sugar, some milk, and a little gelato stabilizer (to keep it from getting icy). Technically we're a bakery; the gelato freezer was added a few years ago because one cannot live on cake alone...

The strawberries are from Snow's Bend Farm, in Coker, Alabama, not ten miles from the bakery as the crow flies. Maybe even closer. Of course I can't hop on a crow, so it seems a bit further as my car goes around the bends in the dusty road behind the airport.

Titanic Tribute -- Cabin Biscuits and Currant Rolls

Like a lot of people, I'm fascinated by the Titanic. I am also overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available about the ship, her passengers, and the 100-year anniversary of her ill-fated maiden voyage.

I've seen most of the movies, read lots of books, spent hours upon hours on the Internet, and visited the traveling exhibit of Titanic Artifacts when it was in Cleveland many years ago. I also own a copy of the blueprint for the ship and a signed and numbered (3/450) lithograph by Stephen J. Card. OK, sorry, that's bragging.

My obsession interest in the Titanic comes honestly.

Celebrate St. Patrick's Day at Mary's!

We live holiday-to-holiday at the bakery, and Saturday is St. Patrick's Day.

Of all the holidays we celebrate, St. Patrick's Day is the one we probably know the least about. We honor Saint Patrick, who wasn't even Irish.

We wear green.

We go to church.

We watch a parade.

We go to a pub (or two or three).

We eat corned beef and cabbage or hash.

We eat and drink way more than we should.

 This year, be prepared with a few facts about St. Patrick's Day:

• St. Patrick’s Day began as a religious holiday to honor St. Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century.
• Patrick was born in 385 AD in Britain. At age 16, he was captured and sold into slavery to a sheep farmer in Ireland. He escaped when he was 22 and spent the next 12 years in a monastery in England. Then he returned to Ireland as a Christian evangelist. He died at Saul on March 17, 461 and is buried at Downpatrick.
• Saint Patrick is said to have used the shamrock, a three-leaved plant, to explain the holy trinity to the pagan Irish, and the wearing and display of shamrocks and shamrock-inspired designs have become a ubiquitous feature of the day.

How will we celebrate St. Patrick's Day at the bakery?

• We'll have Irish Soda Bread. Irish soda bread gets its name and distinctive character from the use of baking soda rather than yeast as a leavening agent. Traditionally made with soft wheat or whole wheat flour and bran, we make it with a combination of rye and soft wheat flours, and add caraway seeds and raisins.
• We'll have shamrock shortbread cookies to represent the holy trinity, and because they taste great and are green!
• We'll have corned beef sandwiches. Sorry, no cabbage or hash (the smell of cabbage cooking is not a *bakery* smell. The meat will be on our homemade sourdough rye bread.
• We'll have Guinness and Chocolate gelato, for a little taste of the pub crawl. And pistachio gelato, for another something green.
• At 1:30, we'll celebrate the Cookie Throwdown! -- our cookie decorating contest. The theme is "Gone Fishing" and most of the cookies will be green.

By the end of the day, your taste buds will thank you, and you'll still be able to walk and speak clearly.

 

Bootleg Bakers

boot-leg: To make, sell, or transport (alcoholic liquor) for sale illegally. To produce, distribute, or sell illegally or without permission.

Mary's Cakes and Pastries is a licensed food service establishment. In exchange for permission to legally sell our products to the public, we abide by state and local laws, pay a variety of license and permitting fees, collect taxes, and incur a plethora of other costs. If you look on the wall by the front door, you'll see our permits and licenses as well as the latest inspection report from the Alabama Department of Public Health.

To the best of my knowledge there are al least eight other licensed bakeries in Tuscaloosa County (not counting in-store bakeries).

But I'm sure EVERYONE knows SOMEONE who makes and sells cakes or cookies out of their home. Home bakers. I know several.

Catching Up

Truly, the best place to see timely photos of our cakes and cookies is on Facebook. I can upload them from my phone without thinking too much or or having to put sentences together. That being said, here's  a photo recap of what we've been up to since Valentines Day.

First I accidentally deleted EVERY SINGLE PHOTO on the website by changing one little field in the database that contains the photos and their pertinent facts. About one-third have been (painstakenly) re-submittted. Yipee! Only 400 more to go...

Mardi Gras was February 21. But if you think we are done with those delicious King Cakes until next January, you'd be wrong.

Everyone (including us) liked them so much that we decided to keep them around.

But without the colored sugars and plastic babies.

Plus, we get to experiment with new flavors. This one is almond, but we make a killer cinnamon, strawberry and apricot, in addition to the traditional cream cheese.

If you absolutely MUST have a baby in your coffee cake, we have new plastic ones. They look a little like mummies (and I am NOT referring to the British version of "mommies"). Our new supplier stocks them, but I had to buy 1000, so we're trying to get used to them. Wonder if there is such as thing as a spray tan for babies?

We take holidays at the bakery very seriously, especially when they can be celebrated with cookies. Dr. Seuss' Birthday on Friday, March 2 was a perfect example.

Green Eggs and Ham (we did eventually make green hams but I didn't get a picture), Horton Hears a Who, The Cat in the Hat, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. It was so much fun making these we plan to do it again next year.

Coincidentally, we also made a Dr. Seuss themed baby shower cake on Saturday. Those figures that look like cut-outs? They are HAND PAINTED by Sarah and Erin on fondant.