Early in the morning, Shoshanah Abraham walks into her muraled shop and dips her hand into a silver bowl and sifts white non-GMO flour to create her latest organic work of art.
Abraham is the founder and baker at Getting Caked, a bakery on Wardlow Road that specializes in handcrafted baked goods often made with local, sustainable and organic ingredients.
“That’s really just how I try to live my life,” Abraham said of her sustainable practices. “I’m passionate about that. I think everybody should be doing it, really [for] the life of the planet.”
The organic flour used at the bakery was consciously chosen from an in-state mill in Petaluma.
Central Milling non-GMO bags of flour sit on a prep table at Getting Caked, a cake shop in the California Heights neighborhood of Long Beach, on Nov. 3, 2021. (Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune) 
Shoshanah Abraham opens the door to the refrigerator that also serves as a notepad inside her shop, Getting Caked, in the California Heights neighborhood of Long Beach on Nov. 3, 2021. (Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune)
The bakery also uses evaporated cane sugar and mine salt from Utah with a trace of minerals in it.
“It’s all just like earth ingredients,” said Jonathan Magnusson-Gumm, Abraham’s partner. “We try to source as consciously as possible to be able to support a more sustainable future when and if we can.”
One of the bakery’s concerns is making sure that its products are accessible to all. One of its early challenges was balancing sustainability with cost.
“At the end of the day the response has been extraordinary, the support from the community has been overwhelming and so that’s the proof right there,” Magnusson-Gumm said.
For Abraham, who started her business in Florida in 2010, baking has been passed down from generation to generation. Some of her earliest baking memories are from making holiday desserts at her grandmother’s Michigan home.
Having such a deep connection with baking, the process of creating pastries is intimate for Abraham.
The dough used at the shop is hand-mixed and no commercial mixers are used in the process.
The resulting pastries are available to order online and range from lemon bars, banana bread loaves, to a half dozen cinnamon rolls––a customer favorite.
Abraham’s most popular items however are picturesque custom cakes.
A white custom multi-tiered lemon and eucalyptus wedding cake is among the projects the shop boasts, as well as floral buttercream frosted cakes. However, the shop’s Instagram page is rife with artful creations.
One cake, blanketed in hot pink with a lime green frosting, has white gerbera daisy decorations attached to the sides while a green alien, a happy face and red cherries top off the whimsical design.
Other creations include a cake version of Baby Yoda and a red and white Poke Ball with its famed characters sitting atop.
The pastries and the subsequent posts on Getting Caked’s social media are churned out often, something that drove Abraham to open up the California Heights shop in early 2020.
“I’ve always wanted to be an artist,” Abraham said. “I love working with my hands. A lot of the different passions I have in my life pretty much all revolve around hands and art. What better way to make art than with pastry.”
One of the other components of the shop is The Rise, a small pizza kitchen that specializes in hand-tossed artisan-style pizzas. The ingredients used are also locally sourced.
“It’s all really unique because at the end of the day we love food,” Magnusson-Gumm said. “Our taste buds kind of direct us into what we’re going to produce.”
Currently, The Rise is closed, but Abraham is working on opening it again at a later date.
“[My favorite part] is getting to see the community,” Abraham said of Getting Caked. “Just kind of sharing what I feel passionate about with the community in the form of food, which is so important to me.”
Getting Caked is located at 913 E Wardlow Rd. It is open Monday through Thursday by appointment and Friday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. For more information call (562) 285-7198 or follow the shop on Instagram @getting_caked.
