Pursuing passion over protocol

Lisa Raffael’s recipe for success: You can do anything you want as long as you are passionate and have a cheerleader. Raffael’s passion has led her to huge success with Delicious Desserts, a company she runs out of her garage-turned-bakery in Falmouth. When she isn’t baking in her home office, she teaches at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, takes on Food Network cake competitions and hosts baking events for charity.

Raffael didn’t always have a penchant for frosting and sprinkles, though. She had an established career in marketing for 10 years after graduating from the Boston University School of Management in 1982, but left the job soon after to enroll in culinary school.

‘I got really lucky,’ Raffael said. ‘I went through my midlife crisis at 30 instead of 50.’

Her immediate postgraduate aftermath involved a job at Dennison Manufacturing Company in Framingham where she was the marketing manager for the company’s most successful product ‘-‘- the plastic staple ‘-‘- which is used to attach tags to clothing. The company boasted 90 percent of the worldwide market for plastic staples and Raffael enjoyed the challenge of handling such a high-profile commodity.

But when an ethical dilemma surrounding selective pricing for a specific client fell on her shoulders, she knew she had had enough.

Through subsequent conversations with a career counselor, Raffael discovered that cooking was her ultimate passion.

‘When the counselor said that I should be a chef, I said that there was no way that my family would stand for that,’ she said. ‘It was always the creative part of the marketing job that I liked, [but] I was raised in a family that believed the only real careers were in medicine or law.’

Raffael’s mother, Marilyn Flynn, said her daughter loved baking and decorating cakes when she was little and that she wasn’t surprised when her daughter chose culinary arts over marketing.

With the help of her counselor and a newly turned cheerleader in her mother, Raffael mustered the courage to pursue her passion, and enrolled in the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts in 1990.

At culinary school, Raffael excelled in the baking portion of the curriculum. Her instructor and founder of the school, Roberta Dowling, tailored the curriculum to benefit mid-career changers.

Like Raffael, Dowling changed careers after doubting her first career choice.

‘Roberta was colorful and a wealth of knowledge,’ Raffael said. ‘She was inspirational and she was proof that you should do what you love, be passionate about it, and it will all work out,’ Raffael said.

While at Cambridge Culinary, Raffael took a job Davio’s on Arlington Street, owned by fellow BU and Cambridge Culinary graduate Steve DiFillippo. Raffael worked as a pastry chef and got in better touch with her creative side, making all of the desserts from scratch.

After graduating from culinary school in 1991, Raffael moved in with her mother on Cape Cod. She continued to work at Davio’s, but the commute to Boston became such a burden that she relocated to Falmouth’s The Quarter Deck, where she worked as a waitress, bartender and occasionally pastry chef.

Raffael enjoyed the job, but decided to leave after a management change and took a job as a secretary at a friend’s dental practice. On the weekends she baked cakes from her mother’s kitchen ‘-‘- the beginning of Delicious Desserts.

In Delicious Desserts’ first year in 1992, Raffael baked a total of six cakes. Seventeen years later, eight-a-week is a disappointment.

‘At the beginning I didn’t put in any overhead because I was working [in] my mom’s kitchen,’ she said, and added were it not for the support of her mother and stepfather, Pop-Pop Pete, the task would have been all-too-daunting.’

Raffael didn’t know how much of each of the cake ingredients she would need in the beginning, and frequently ran short.

‘Pop-Pop Pete had to go to the Stop & Shop a few times a day to pick things up I needed,’ she said. ‘He was great. It was his blood, sweat and tears, and Momma’s support that made it happen,’

By the end of the first year, Raffael could whip up one cake a weekend, and she knew her cakes could no longer be restricted by borrowed pots and pans.

Sensing her need to expand, a friend helped Raffael find a kitchen that she could rent for $100 a month that was still close to her mother’s house. Raffael used old-fashioned networking and the relatively small size of the Cape’s community to get her name out.

At the time, Konditor Meister was Massachusetts’ only other wedding cake competition. When Raffael delivered her first cake to a wedding at the Popponesset Inn, the florist confused it for her competitor’s, but Raffael was not discouraged.

Eventually, Raffael decided to leave the rented kitchen, investing in her own house and converting the garage into her workspace. However, the social aspect of working from home had its drawbacks.

‘I still had an ego from my previous career, so it was hard for me to tell people that I worked out of my home. It took me about 30 seconds to get over it, though.’

Raffael had to build her cake repertoire quickly because she had never made most of the kinds of cakes that her clients requested. Raffael would show customers magazine cutouts of cakes she hoped to one day figure out. For the first six years, every cake she made was a practice cake. Now, when she interviews brides about the kind of cake they want, and she has a portfolio with pictures of all the different types of cakes she has created in the past.

‘There is no school that says come here and we will make you great at cake making. They can give you direction but you have to make it work,’ she said. ‘You can only master it as quickly as you have enough practice.’

Now, Raffael is one of the most sought-after pastry chefs for wedding cakes on the Cape. She says she has an innate sense for how a cake should fit a wedding.

‘Cakes have a feel,’ Raffael said. ‘I ask the bride about what the wedding itself will be like, what the bridesmaids will be wearing, what the venue is like, whether it is casual or elegant, what the centerpieces are like, and how many people will be there.’

Raffael’s cakes have been the crowning point of countless Cape Cod weddings for 17 years, and she has made most alone, hiring summer help only occasionally or requesting the help of close friends.

‘[Raffael] is very passionate, she takes so much pride in all her cakes and everything she does,’ said Caitlin O’Brien, Raffael’s close friend and one of the few who has ever assisted with’ her baking. ‘I’ve tried her cakes, they are delicious, and I think that’s why I have gained forty or fifty pounds.’

The competition from other new cake shops on the Cape has kept Raffael on her toes.

‘I’m only as good as my last cake,’ she said.

‘When there is nowhere else to get anything, it’s easy to let your guard down, but the competition has made me focus even more,’ she said.

But the reputation of her hand-crafted cakes and small-time business has kept her in the running with giants like Konditor Meister.

‘She is the best designer on the Cape,’ said Allison Liset, a’ Cape Cod wedding planner who’ has worked with Raffael for 10 years. ‘Some folks say [she’s the best in] Massachusetts because she has won all the Food Network awards.’

But, no matter what praises surround Raffael, the baker hasn’t let it go to her head. Instead, today she has begun to play the role of cheerleader for others, now that she has found her passion and continues to successfully pursue it. Now a teacher at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, she hopes her up-and-leave approach to the professional world will inspire others.

‘When I look at the people I teach, I can say, ‘You know, I was in your exact shoes once,” she said.