Cake bonding.(DOWNTIME GOURMET BAKER)

For Karen Weiner Escalera, CEO of marketing communication and consulting firm KWE Group Inc., learning the fundamentals of baking cakes was a mother-daughter project as well as a lesson in alternative domesticity.

"My mother was an artist and she really wasn't interested in domestic things, but she liked to bake," Weiner says. "We would bake pies, pineapple upside-down cake, and my favorite was the yellow cake with Hershey icing. You would melt the Hershey bars--it was easy but it was delicious."

Though she occasionally bakes cakes for dinner parties and friends, Weiner says she now bakes for her own enjoyment, whipping up about two cakes a month. Making a cake from scratch is an exacting process for Weiner, who feels concentration and the right ingredients are key to a successful outcome. "You can't fool around," she says. "Like, when you're measuring the vanilla you can't have too little or too much or it will ruin it. It has to be exact."

When not baking, Weiner travels the world doing business for her 26-year old firm, which specializes in luxury travel. She relocated the firm in 2002, from New York to Coral Gables. Baking, though, is never far from her mind. Through her travels she has managed to build a collection of international inspiration: French violet candies, marzipan figures from Mexico, candied almonds from Spain. And though she has visited pastry shops around the world to sample the wares, she says she holds a special place in her heart for one spot--Magnolia Bakery in New York City. The shop makes "the best American layer cake in the world," she says.

While inspiration may come from her travels, Weiner's recipes come from a collection of several dozen cookbooks, and she cites her two Magnolia books as her greatest resource. She continues to build on a fascination with what she calls the classics--experimenting with layer cakes (her personal favorite) and compromising her own sweet tooth to satisfy her Spanish husband's taste for bizcocho, a ...