GUILDERLAND — You name it, she has made it: An Incredible Hulk cake with a green fist shooting up from the top. A cake for a Coptic Orthodox bishop’s visit, featuring a large edible crown. Even a holiday cake topped with a full-course sculpted Thanksgiving dinner and place settings.

Self-taught baker Nivene Rophael of Guilderland takes a customer’s ideas for a theme and adds her own design ideas to come up with cakes that are remembered long after the last crumb is gone.

Her business began because she wanted to please her son.

Samuel’s sixth birthday was approaching, and he wanted a “Finding Nemo” cake. Rophael went to her favorite local bakery to ask how much it would cost for a large and elaborate cake with a Nemo theme — perhaps a two-layer cake with sculpted fish and undersea scenes.

She was imagining not frosting but fondant — the thicker icing used on wedding cakes that is rolled out like pie crust and then placed over the cake, and which can also be shaped to make decorations. Fondant, she said recently in an interview at her home, gives a cake a very neat look.            

When she found out it would be $250 or $300 to order such a cake, she thought, “Maybe I could make it myself.”

So she and Samuel went out and bought some ready-made fondant. They “made an evening of it” shaping it into pieces of coral. “Then we tasted it, and it was awful.”

She knew then that she would have to make her own.

Rophael found a recipe online for tastier, actually edible, fondant and tried it. After one failure — she had added food coloring to the entire batch for the frosting, to make it the color of the sea, and had not realized how the extra liquid would affect the consistency — she had it just right and was able to make the cake she had envisioned.

It was sitting on the kitchen island, and the guests would see it when they came in and say, “Beautiful cake, where’d you get it?” When she said she had made it herself, they said, “No way!” and then, “Do you have a business?”

But, she related over coffee at that same kitchen counter, it wasn’t until they began to try it and to tell her that it not only looked good but also tasted “amazing” that she began to think maybe it could be a business.

Two years and 80 cakes later, “I think it’s come a long way,” she said.

She now runs a small cake business — Sweet Sensations by Vina — from her home, making cakes completely by hand, by herself. She averages about one a week, but often is asked to do more than one at a time, like when she made separate cakes with different themes — Spiderman, an array of superheroes, and Angry Birds — for each of three triplet boys who were turning 6. 

Steeped in heritage

Rophael knew how to make a cake without a mix long before ever making her first decorative fondant cake. Raised in Egypt, she was taught by her mother, who she says is an excellent cook and baker.

Cake is very popular in Egypt too, she said, although the taste is quite different, she said. “There’s something about the taste. It’s not just your regular too-sweet frosting that you see when you go to Price Chopper or Hannaford or any grocery store. Frosting there had a very distinct taste.”

The country is also proud of its version of baklava — and they’re aware that there is also a Greek and a Lebanese version — made with walnuts or sometimes pistachios.

Another popular sweet is basboosa: “Not really a pastry — it’s more like a cake but more moist.”

There is also kataifi, “a pastry thinner than angel hair.” You mix it, Rophael said, “with butter and some other ingredients and then you bake it and put syrup on top.”

And there are lots of “interesting cookies, especially for Christmastime,” with “nuts or caramel, things like that” in the center.

Rophael’s family has had ties to the Capital Region for half a century; her uncle came first, in the 1960s, because a friend of his was here.

Rophael’s brother encouraged her, after she graduated from Cairo University with a bachelor’s of science degree in computer sciences and then held jobs for several years as a programmer/analyst and systems engineer, to look for a job in the Northeast of the United States. His company in Cairo had transferred him first to the United Kingdom and then to New York City.

“He figured that, if I came, then my parents would, too,” she said. “That was his devious plan,” she said with a laugh. They weren’t going to leave both their kids, she said. And Rophael’s baby sister was there in Egypt too, she added; her parents would want her to be with her brother and sister. “So they would come, he thought.”

And his plan worked. Rophael found a job here in Rensselaer, as a senior software developer and analyst for a software house. Her parents, who had had “green cards forever,” did indeed follow.

Her parents had applied for green cards about 20 years earlier, when a number of relatives had entered the United States. “It was a lot easier then,” Rophael said. Her parents may have applied for the cards, but they weren’t actually interested in moving to the U.S. She recalled that the U.S. government would send them reminders that their green card applications needed to be renewed, and they would dutifully renew them, over the years.

Rophael’s mother still lives in the area, with her sister — Rophael’s aunt­. In 2001, Rophael’s father was diagnosed with mesothelioma about a year after his arrival in the States, and he died just seven months later, in 2002.

He was a research chemist, and the reason that Rophael speaks such fluent and unaccented English is not just that she’s been living here since 1999, but also because she grew up going back and forth between Cairo and England, where her father would move the family whenever he would be assigned to a research project at the University of Kent for a couple of years.

After the birth of her second child, Rophael left the job that she had held for more than 10 years in Rensselaer, so that she could spend more time with her children while they were still small. Since then, her husband Hany, a systems/network engineer, has been supporting the family financially.

Now that the children are both in school — the younger in pre-K — during the day, Rophael is contemplating going back to work in the IT field, possibly part-time.

Legacy lives on

Her children — Samuel, 7, and Olivia, 4 — are very interested in the process of baking, especially her son, who likes art and who shares his mother’s inclination toward perfectionism. An elegantly shaped foot-and-a-half-tall papier-mâché rooster stands on Rophael’s kitchen counter, in process, that she and Samuel are making, the paper stretched across it in neat rows that looked laid on by a surgeon.

The children will ask her what she’s working on and ask her to tell them her ideas for the design. For them it’s kind of like Play-Doh, she said. “They love to play with extra fondant.”

And depending on the cake design — “like if it’s a dome” — she always has pieces of cake that she needs to cut away to create the shape. “So I always end up with extras, which they are always eating. And with the frosting, I always leave the whisks for them to lick. They always want to know whether I’m going to have frosting for them today,” she said.

(She does use frosting, too. She said that there is always a layer of butter cream frosting underneath the fondant. “It’s kind of the glue that makes it stick.”)

One sweet she regularly bakes for her family is petits fours, which she makes with a cookie press, in various shapes. “Before one batch is eaten, I have to make the next one, or my kids will torture me,” she said.

She has always made unique cakes for her children’s birthdays, one in the shape of a crown for her daughter, and another a guitar for her son. “It was just frosting back then. What I like about fondant is being able to make the shapes, as well as how neat it looks.”

Her work continues as a labor of love. It’s hard to make a real business from artisanal cakes made by hand by one person, she mused.

“If you were to do it as a living,” Rophael said, “you really would go out and get a storefront, and hire people, so you’re overseeing the whole thing, and maybe doing the final details and touches. You’d get somebody to bake, somebody to clean up.”

As it is now — “especially since a lot of it is my friends and family, it’s not something that you make a living at,” she said. “Even if my friends are paying, it’s still comes out to about five to seven dollars an hour. I’m very detail-oriented, so it takes me a lot longer than it would take other people.”

But for now she continues to strive for perfection. “Because it’s not perfect until it’s perfect, you know?”