The Rainbow Pride Cake Comes into the Sun

Within a few hours of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark moves to strike down a key part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and leave for dead Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban, San Francisco pastry chef Dante Nuño got a call from a company in the Bay Area.

“They wanted me to make them a wedding cake that very day – not because anyone was getting married, but simply because they wanted to celebrate gay marriage,” an excited Nuño explained.

He had to turn the company down because he “didn’t have enough time to turn a wedding cake around,” but since that day, Nuño — whose online business, Fire and Icing, offers one-of-a-kind cakes and cookies and is known for its LGBT-themed creations – has been flooded with wedding cake orders from same-sex couples.

Nuño is thrilled.

“I’m psyched to be able to create all kinds of cakes for my friends and for people who couldn’t marry before but now can,” he said.

Nuño, who attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., first made his signature three-tiered Rainbow Pride cake years ago (when same-sex marriage wasn’t an option) for a group called Gay Future Dads. “Things were very different then but we were going to celebrate anyway,” he says.

Since then, he has made loads of Rainbow Pride Cakes, many other LGBT-themed cakes, and also wedding cakes as more states have passed legislation allowing same-sex marriage.

But Nuño insists that his creations are much more than just “sticking two men or two women on top of a cake.” They’re a labor of love, each one taking hours to make. And because Nuño works with the finest ingredients and to the highest of standards, he does not accept many orders. Plus, he also works full time as a human resources manager in San Francisco.

Nuño has also created specialty cakes for the Walt Disney Family Museum; the San Francisco MOMA and the de Young Museum of Fine Arts, among others. “I’m all about making sculpted, artistic cakes,” explains Nuno.

“Sometimes, I can get quite crazy, and that’s because I love what I do.”