When Amirah Kassem was asked to make an edible mask for Vogue’s Halloween feature, “Masters of Disguise,” she had no idea Grace Coddington and rapper A$AP Ferg would be eating it off her face by the end of the shoot. The 27-year-old, who recently launched her own made-to-order baking business, Flour Shop, already has New York’s style set clamoring for her trompe l’oeil creations, and on this particular day, she was shooting alongside the likes of actress Mickey Sumner and model Jessica Hart.
“Mine was the only one that was edible, so afterwards, everyone on set was breaking pieces off and eating it,” Kassem says of the shoot, which featured masked creations from 39 designers, including Erdem, Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier. “I used white chocolate broken into big chunks glued with melted chocolate onto a mold of a Batman mask, which I clicked off before painting it with edible gold. Everyone loved it. The experience was so crazy awesome.”
Fashion and food aren’t often associated with each other — quite the opposite, in fact. But fashionistaturned-“ flourist” Kassem is hoping to change that. After six years in the industry (working in the creative department at Interview magazine, and as a general manager for the clothing label BLK DNM), she decided she’d had enough of the “unglamorous environment” of fashion to which outsiders aren’t always privy. So she directed her energies toward her other passion: cake.
With her one-woman business, Kassem — who says she’s “trying to get the fashion industry to crack a smile one custom cake at a time” — now makes frosted confections for Vogue on a regular basis, and has taken birthday orders from models Jessica Stam and Hilary Rhoda as well as rappers Kid Cudi and Snoop Dogg.
Flour Shop, which she started a year ago, has no brick-and-mortar store “yet,” she says. Instead, customers send requests via e-mail. “I’m still solo,” she says. “I do need lots of help. If I could figure out where Willy Wonka got all the Oompa-Loompas, I would definitely import them.”
Her playground of a work space would certainly make the master of confectionery proud. Located in East Brooklyn, close to her apartment, Kassem’s baking studio is full of toys, giant Disney figurines and colorful dollhouses.
Each cake takes about six to eight hours to make. It’s not surprising, then, that Kassem’s cakes are on the pricier side. Starting at $500 for custom cake balls or “something like a six-layer rainbow cake,” budgets have at times exceeded $10,000 — which would get you “literally anything,” she says.
Kassem — who has no formal culinary training and insists her first “true break” came at age 5 while baking with her mother — says she is “insanely” grateful for the support the fashion industry has shown her. “If you think about it, cakes at fashion parties were never a thing — you’d have Champagne and some hors d’oeuvres,” she says. Now, if people go to an event that hasn’t ordered a Flour Shop cake, it seems the brand’s status can come into question. “It’s funny, I was talking to my friend who works for Billy Farrell Agency, which sort of legitimizes a party as being ‘cool’ if they’re shooting it, and he was telling me that now if there’s no Flour Shop, people ask ‘Why?’ And that feels cool.”
Here are a few of Amirah’s most creative confections:
