January 2012. Before there was ‘The Cake Boss,’ there was Edna.

Edna Welch of Edna’s Cake Creations in Natchez, Mississippi, that is. For more than thirty years, Welch has sweetened special occasions within a two-hundred-mile radius with her jaw-dropping pastry art … from realistic floral flights of fancy—“I like to make each flower on my cakes just a little bit different”—to red velvet armadillos.

Thank you, Hollywood. Y’all might remember that the 1989 hit movie Steel Magnolias introduced the world to the bizarrely tacky idea of a red velvet groom’s cake fashioned to look like a life-size armadillo. In the movie, sour-tempered older female character Ouiser and father of the bride Drum shared a few lines with the scene-stealing prop:

Drum: Ouiser, can we call a truce long enough for me to get a piece of cake?

(Ouiser slices him the tail piece of an

armadillo cake.)

Drum: Aww, thanks Ouiser. Nothin’ like a good piece of ...

Just as the nine-banded armadillo has consistently expanded his natural habitat, moving from Texas across the Southeast all the way to Florida, these heinous groom’s cakes have become as common place at Southern weddings as big hair and gatoring to “Shout” by the Isley Brothers.

Welch said that since the movie came out, she has made at least forty armadillo groom’s cakes and countless other manly pastry monstrosities inspired by river bottom outdoors like wide -mouth bass, catfish, alligators, a chocolate lab with a duck in its mouth … “I’ve even made a wild hog cake!” she said with a laugh.

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