04-11-2024 Howard Magazine - Flipbook - Page 17
Michael, 3, received an Icing Smiles’cake to celebrate the end of treatment. He
successfully completed chemotherapy and radiation for cancer after a 2021
diagnosis. COURTESY OF ICING SMILES
away cakes she had made. She
ended up talking to someone in
marketing who thought it was an
“amazing idea” and encouraged
her to pursue it.
She credits a social media
post that went viral shortly
after launching Icing Smiles for
providing the biggest boost to the
organization.
Quisenberry was asked to provide a cake for a child receiving
cancer treatment at Memorial
Sloan Kettering in New York City.
She reached out to a well-known
Food Network personality, Kate
Sullivan, who blogged about the
experience to her large group of
online followers.
Soon after, Quisenberry said,
hundreds of people across the
country were signing up as
volunteers — or “sugar angels,” as
she calls them, and Icing Smiles
was receiving cake requests from
around the world.
“It was amazing to me that it
hadn’t been done. … I like to say
cake has just an intangible magical
power.”
Chelsea Boog, a native of Glenwood, signed up as a sugar angel
after finishing culinary school. She
had created just a handful of cakes
for Icing Smiles by 2016, when her
first son, Vincent, was born with
severe congenital heart defects.
“[He] was life-flighted to Children’s National [Hospital] and underwent four open-heart surgeries
and ended up passing away at 10
weeks old,” Boog, 32, said.
Icing Smiles created a memorial
cake for a party celebrating what
would have been Vincent’s first
birthday.
In 2020, after completing her
master’s degree in marketing,
Boog joined the leadership team
at Icing Smiles as marketing
manager.
“I have seen the organization
from both sides,” she said, describing Icing Smiles as a “small but
mighty force.”
“Our sugar angels are so passionate about what they do and
we have people ready to jump,”
Boog said.
Today, Quisenberry estimates
the organization fills over 99% of
the cake requests they receive.
In early March, the group was
struggling to fill a request in North
Dakota, where they did not have
a baker within 100 miles of the
family.
“It’s very rare that we are not
able to fill a request,” Quisenberry
said, adding that Icing Smiles
works directly with families to
make sure a cake would be well
received and to work out any
dietary restrictions. Most important to her, she said, is the child’s
experience. Some of the cakes can
be elaborate and people might
even view them as works of art,
Quisenberry said, but for a sick
kid, it’s much more than that.
“You’ve completely changed
their environment, even for a
short period of time,” Quisenberry
said “And sometimes that’s all they
need to kind of break a funk or to
get past a difficult treatment, you
know, just enough positive to get
them to push through.”
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