Colette Peters, USA

[Carymax Moderator]

Classes Taught
2009 - Cake Decorating for Pastry Chefs
2008 - Wedding Cakes (Hands-On - with Nicholas Lodge)

Colette Peters is the owner of Colette's Cakes, a specialty cake company she founded in New York City in 1989. Though an avid baker since the age of eight in her hometown of Chicago, she started her career as a painter, earning a master's degree in painting from the Pratt Institute. Then she worked as a designer at Tiffany & Co., where she was always making cakes for her co-workers. Design director John Loring asked Colette to create cakes for his classic books Tiffany Taste (Doubleday, 1986) and The Tiffany Wedding (1988), which led to a contract her first book. She'd found her calling: after eight years, Colette left Tiffany to pursue decorating full-time.

Since 1991, Colette has since written five books, Colette's Cakes: The Art of Cake Decorating (1991), Colette's Christmas (1993), Colette's Wedding Cakes (1995), and Colette's Birthday Cakes (2000), all published by Little, Brown & Company, and Cakes to Dream On (2004), published by John Wiley & Sons. Colette also created cakes for the book Simple Stunning Weddings: Designing and Creating your Perfect Celebration by Karen Bussen (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2004).

Colette works on her groundbreaking designs in a busy storefront kitchen in Greenwich Village, where she has made cakes for many celebrities, including Yoko Ono, Sting, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Whoopi Goldberg, Natasha Richardson, Jann Wenner, Russell Simmons, Tommy Tune, Al Pacino, Eartha Kitt, Robert Altman, the Rolling Stones and Roxy Music. But she spends a lot of time on the road, too, delivering cakes throughout America, Europe and the Caribbean or assembling her more elaborate creations, such as the eight-tier wedding cake and 1,500 individual cakes she made for the royal wedding of Prince Pavlos of Greece to Marie-Chantal Miller in London.

In addition to designing one-of-a-kind cakes for individual clients, Colette has undertaken a variety of special commissions. In 1996 she created a cake commemorating the Renwick Museum as part of the 150th anniversary celebration for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In both 1997 and 1999, she designed the Christmas windows at Tiffany's flagship store in New York City on Fifth Avenue. She has also designed cake for the 5th Avenue windows of Cartier.

In 1998, and again in 2000, Colette was asked by First Lady Hillary Clinton to create Christmas scenes in sugar to decorate three public rooms in the White House. The Capitol called again in 2005, this time for a five-foot-long replica—in cake—of the White House to celebrate the inauguration of President Bush.

Colette is well-known to viewers of the TV Food Network's popular competitions, as the winner of both the Beaver Creek Wedding Cake Challenge in 2004 and the 2005 Mystery Cake Challenge, each of which carried a $10,000 prize. She has also won the Grand Prix de Paris and three gold medals from Societé Culinaire Philanthropique.

In 2006 she was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Visiting Chef Award from Johnson and Wales University, a tribute to her reputation as a teacher. Colette has been sharing her expertise with students throughout the United States, Brazil, and Europe since 1990, in private classes and at the Culinary Institute of America in California, the French Culinary Institute, the French Pastry School, the Wilton School, L'Academie de Cuisine, the Institute of Culinary Education, the Notter School of Pastry Arts and the Peters Valley Crafts Center, as well as in her storefront kitchen. She has also participated in the Epcot Food and Wine Festival, the De Gustibus series at Macy's in New York City and the Let's Got Cooking series at Williams-Sonoma.

Often asked to create cakes for magazine layouts, Colette has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, Town & Country, Brides, New York, InStyle, Food & Wine, Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Day, Good Housekeeping, Food Arts, Pastry Art & Design and Victoria. Her cakes have appeared in films, Broadway plays, television shows and commercials, and she and her creations have been seen on the Oprah Winfrey Show, CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, and on the Discovery Channel, CNN and Lifetime Television.

Colette has been teaching classes for many years, at many distinguished pastry and cake decorating schools, including the Notter School of Pastry Arts, the Wilton School, French Pastry School, Institute of Culinary Education, Johnson Wales University, Cal Java, and The Culinary Institute of America. She has also been a guest instructor throughout the world, including Brazil, Holland, England, Sweden, Hawaii, and Portugal, just to name a few.

In 2007 Colette was awarded a Trendsetter of the Year Award by Modern Bride magazine. She was also awarded the highly acclaimed Top Ten Pastry Chef of 2007 by Pastry Art and Design magazine. Colette was the first cake decorator to receive this honor.

Colette is on the advisory board of American Cake Decorating magazine and a member of the Baker's Dozen East, the International Cake Exploration Societé and the New York Women's Culinary Alliance.