(LEFT) - Toni Toulos decorates one of her creations for a deserving child.By SUMMER KELLEY First published in the March 26 edition.
(LEFT) - Toni Toulos decorates one of her creations for a deserving child.
She sweetens their special day. Toni Toulos is a wife, mother and foster mom who has turned a family tradition into a service for her community. Toulos offers free birthday cakes to the children of low–income families.
“I don’t really do the standard cakes like at the grocery stores,” Toulos said. “I try to make a unique, dream cake. I always tell them I am only limited by imagination.”
Toulos has always made cakes for her family, keeping them out of sight until it was time to reveal the surprise. One year, Toulos said she made a cake for a foster child that had been with them for a while. When the cake was brought out after dinner, the girl began to cry.
Later she told Toulos and her husband that she had never had a birthday cake and never one so nice. Toulos said she and her husband were surprised and began discussing how they might help other children get birthday cakes they might not get normally.
It began through word of mouth and friends and has now grown into a community service that reaches across state lines to Alabama and Tennessee. Free Cakes for Kids has a website and has advertisements in the Dade County Sentinel, and at the Laundromat. Toulos has also talked with the Department of Family and Children Services, churches and schools letting people know about what she does.
“I get calls all the time,” Toulos said. “There are still a lot of people who don’t know about it.”
Anything from tiered cakes to mountains to character cakes, Toulos will make what the children request. She likes to talk with both the parents and the children to come up with a cake that will surprise and excite the birthday girl/boy.
One little girl asked for roses, frogs, palm trees and a mountain.
“Kids are sometimes very traditional and sometimes very individual,” Toulos said. “We just try to blend everything together to make it look nice.”
Toulos said that she likes working with cakes and icing because they give her a lot of room to work with. The icing, Toulos makes from scratch and her favorite is butter cream.
She has lost count of how many cakes she does, but generally does around six to eight a week. Out of eight, Toulos said, seven are generally free cakes.
The cakes can take anywhere from an hour and a half to six or seven hours to make, according to Toulos, who enjoys the baking and also makes chocolate tanks that she sends overseas to the troops and her daughter who is stationed near Baghdad.
“We are having fun with it and are trying to give a little happiness,” Toulos said. “There’s virtually not a cake we can’t do.”
Toulos also does cakes for other occasions and asks for a donation of cash or cake mix, eggs, or other cake making items. People interested in one of Toulos’ cakes can contact her through her website, www.freecakesforkids.com, or at (706) 657-2390.
The Dade Sentinel
http://dadesentinel.com/article.php/20080328081951617