Meet Sharon
A mother and grandmother of seven grandchildren, Delta Oaks Cake Decorator Sharon Richards has baked a few cakes over the years – hundreds of them as a matter of fact. With 26 years’ experience as a baker and decorator, her skills are as fine tuned as the full-sheet guitar cake she once created for a 16-year-old music lover.
“It’s a lot of fun being creative and giving people what they want: a one-of-a-kind cake,” she says.
Topping the charts of her favorite cakes to create: birthday and baby cakes, she says. “I love doing kids’ cakes; those are my favorite. I do all of my grandkids’,” she says. “It just makes you feel good, and it’s really gratifying.”
Even her youngest customers have special requests. Once, she says, a 3-year-old boy asked her to make sure she got the “e” right in his name, meaning he wanted it printed instead of the flowing cursive style that often appears on cakes. “He wanted to be able to read his name,” she says. “Of course!’ I said, ‘I’ll make sure the ‘e’ is just right.’”
Sharon joined the Delta Oaks’ Market of Choice Bakery in Eugene four years ago after working for another supermarket bakery for 22 years, where she created a full array of baked goods.
When she’s not baking, she’s growing flowers and vegetables on a 1.5-acre plot that she shares with her partner of six years. When her co-workers’ birthdays roll around, Sharon picks a special bouquet of flowers from her garden to share. Her favorite flowers? Dahlias, statice and more.
Once the garden has been laid to rest for winter and the vegetables have been canned – this year she jarred 48 quarts of green tomato salsa – she pulls out her scrapbooking materials.
It’s also the time of year when she especially enjoys the company of family and her adopted Rottweiler-mastiffs – two gentle giants that happen to be sisters.
“I love to have the family over,” she says. “I do a lot of cooking and baking at home. We raise chickens and feed all the wild birds on our property,” she says. “I was born and raised in the Churchill area and this has always been home to me.”
For her, life is about celebrating friends and family, and if a cake she creates adds more to those special moments, she’s happy.
