Meet Bria...
Bria Helgerson, Co-Owner, Cake Artist
Bria Helgerson is the creative force behind Flourish Cake Design. On any given day you can find her responding to emails & inquiries, meeting with clients, conducting tastings, sketching cake designs, creating thousands of sugar flowers, icing & stacking cake tiers, rolling out pounds of fondant, piping for hours on end, driving ‘Dan Dan the Delivery Van’ all over the city (and beyond), setting up & putting finishing touches on all her cakes at reception venues, liaising with planners & florists, communicating with caterers, posting on social media, designing promotional material, and eating cake scraps (quality control).
A little bit more about Bria...
With a short-lived background in product design following college, Bria started a food blog as a hobby after being laid off from a design consultancy in 2009. The blogging, food photography, & recipe developing quickly snowballed into making desserts and pastries for friends & family, and creating a few wedding cakes for extremely (overly) trusting friends. She eventually decided to enroll in pastry school at Kendall College to learn the basics and fundamentals of baking and pastry. After working in a wholesale bakery, then running a few restaurant pastry kitchens, she quickly realized that cake design was her true passion. In 2014 she began decorating cakes full time, and in 2019 along with Co-Owner Cindy Summers, opened Flourish Cake Design.
Bria lives in nearby Humboldt Park with her husband, and their 100-odd pots of flowers & vegetables on the roof top garden. She has a great love for flowers & plants, using her garden both for self-care away from the studio, but also to grow her knowledge of flowers, their structure, coloring, & detail, to aid her when re-creating them in gum-paste.