If you're the sort of person who TiVo's Ace of Cakes episodes, haunts the aisles of Surfas and Gloria's Cake & Candy Supplies looking for fondant and gumpaste and cake boards, and thinks making a 3-tiered cake adorned with flowers made from royal icing is a good time, then you're in luck. N.Y. Cake West opened a month ago on Pico Blvd., near the Westside Pavilion. The shop is the West Coast sister store of N.Y. Cake & Baking Distributor, a wholesale and retail store which was founded 25 years ago in Manhattan by Joan Mansour, cake decorator, gold medal award winner by the Societe Culinaire Philantropique and Wilton Hall of Fame inductee.

Jenny Kashanian, Mansour's daughter, runs the West Coast operations and has followed in her mother's cake flour-dusted footsteps, offering classes in baking and cake-decorating. Look for classes on subjects such as Flowers & Borders, Fondant & Tiered Cakes, Chocolate Making, and, yes of course, Cupcakes. And, along with the classes and baking supplies, you now have a new source of edible luster dust.

N.Y. Cake West: 10665 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles; (310) 481-0875.

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