Sugar Geek Show Is All About Celebrating Your Inner Geek
Hi I'm Liz Marek! Welcome to the Sugar Geek Show!
Sugar Geek Show is an online cake decorating school that was founded by myself (Liz Marek) and my husband Dan Marek in 2015. The website is a combination of free tried and true recipes and simplified cake tutorials to more advanced techniques for the serious baker and business owner.
I add two new paid tutorials to the website every month, two new recipes and at least two free tutorials which can be watched on the website or on the youtube channel. Paid members get extra bonuses like access to the premium tutorials, private fb group and a gift shipped to them from me every month (elite members only).
About Liz Marek
Teaching is not something I ever thought I would do for a living, neither is baking. My father was a botanist, my mother was a homemaker who rarely baked and I was the artist in the family. I was always drawing or reading.
When I first started baking as a hobby in 2007, I didn't even know what fondant was or how to make buttercream. I made a terrible box cake with canned frosting and a plastic duck on top as my first cake. It was horrifying but OMG did I love making it! I could not get enough! I was buying every book I could find and diving head first into making a cake for anyone that would take one.
This was back in the days where there were NO facebook groups, no online forums, no one to really tell you how to do something and cake books never seemed to tell you the bits in between baking the cake and making it perfect. Like HOW do you make the cakes bake straight? WHY is my frosting so runny? Almost as soon as I started teaching myself to bake and decorate, I started making videos showing how I did them and posted them to my youtube channel.
I had no plan for these videos other than a passion to make and share! These videos gained a lot of popularity over the years and people STILL watch them even though I cringe every time I hear that.
After a couple of years of not really knowing what I was doing but faking it pretty well, I decided to attend Oregon Culinary Institute for baking and pastry and that changed my life. There I learned the fundamentals of not only baking science but dedication, hard work and pride in taste AND appearance. I've been baking and experimenting with recipes ever since and LOVE coming up with new ones.
As my experience grew, my tutorials got longer and longer and more advanced. Eventually people started complaining about the length of the tutorials on youtube and started asking if they could buy my tutorials. I wasn't sure how something like that was really going to work. I didn't like the idea of trying to figure out how much to sell a tutorial for each time I made one so with the help of my husband Dan, we started an artist page on Patreon. Some of my members today where some of my very first patrons!
The page was wildly successful, much more successful than I ever thought it would be and grew rapidly. We would have stayed there but there wasn't really a way to organize the content to find later which really bothered my patrons.
After a few years of making cakes professionally out of my home-based kitchen and making tutorials for patreon on the side I started competing professionally. I really enjoyed the challenge of competition and won a lot of awards which led to being invited to start teaching at cake shows, cake shops and conventions all over the world.
This was super exciting but also a little difficult considering we where just about to have our first child and I was working non-stop on cake orders and I was in the middle of writing my first book.
Now I have to tell you... I grew up super poor. Any traveling we did was in our van and was as far as we could drive. Not that I'm complaining! I deeply appreciate all those family vacations we took together and all the memories made but all my life I have wanted to see how the rest of the world lives. Eat the food, see the culture and experience adventure with my family. I started to think it MIGHT be possible through teaching.
So in 2015, I officially closed Artisan Cake Company. My baby. My award-winning business that I grew from nothing and brought me so much joy. Boy oh boy was that hard! But I knew in order to get to where I wanted to be, I had to close the door on where I was.
Dan built our new website "Sugar Geek Show" named after my facebook group dedicated to teaching and sharing cake knowledge in a friendly and uplifting environment. The new site would be a membership site where you could watch as many videos as you wanted but only pay one price (like Netflix). I was terrified that people would not follow me from Patreon to the new platform but they did! Every day we continue to grow and I am amazed and SO thankful because without our beloved members, I wouldn't get to do what I love for a living, work with my amazing husband, and travel the world with my family.
Sugar Geek Show is my happy place. I am dedicated to constantly creating new techniques, trends and ideas for my members. I love sharing our ideas, clapping for our accomplishments and giving support in our failures . I truly hope Sugar Geek Show can be a place where you feel you can learn, grow and gain the confidence to take the first steps towards your successful journey too.
How To Find Me
I am EVERYWHERE!
No seriously, I live online. So come hang out with me in my facebook group, subscribe to our newsletter so you get the recipes and free tutorials first or find me on my social media channels.