Let them eat cake — at $20 a slice

NEW YORK - In the new movie “The Great New Wonderful,” Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Emme Keeler, an aggressive, insensitive business woman we see making a presentation with a portfolio of sketches in hand and a mini-entourage of 20-something lackeys in tow.

Is she a high-powered ad woman ogling to snare a million-dollar account? A brittle corporate executive who’s managed to penetrate the glass ceiling?

Nope. Emme is a high-end cake designer in New York City. She’ll create a masterpiece for $1,800 at $14 a slice — The Great New Wonderful is the name of her business — and she wants more than anything to topple the reigning Queen of Cake, Safarah Polsky, portrayed by Edie Falco. The movie, set in a post-9/11 New York, opened Friday in New York, Boston and Washington.

Credit Margaret Braun, a real-life cake designer who was a consultant on the film, for the visuals that illustrate this delicious — and often poignant — rivalry. It’s enough to whet the appetite of anyone eager to embark on a hot high-profile career.

The featured dreamy pink confection — Emme is seen putting a finishing touch on the bow of a cascading sugar ribbon — was created by Braun especially for the film.

“It’s a combination of a few of the different motifs I’ve used in other cakes,” says Braun, who’s been in the business for 15 years and describes her style as sculptural, with a high concentration on classical technique. “I’m a total perfectionist when it comes to symmetry and line,” she says. If Braun were to recreate that exact cake for a real-life customer, the price would be much higher — about $5,000 — than the figures Emme quoted.

The photos used during the presentation scenes are of Braun’s cakes — they’re directly from her book “Cakewalk: Adventures in Sugar with Margaret Braun.” The sketches? Also from Braun, who recreated for the movie her original illustrations of cakes for personal clients. She draws not with ink but food coloring.

First Independent Pictures Maggie Gyllenhaal, left, and Edie Falco play rival cake designers in "The Great New Wonderful," which is set in New York soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Unlike Emme, Braun does not have a series of cakes named for Shakespeare’s heroines. And, she says, she does not share Emme’s cutthroat competitive streak, either, even though the market itself is a competitive one.

“I don’t take on tons and tons of work, and I usually work on very special, really big fabulous projects, so there’s always work for me,” says Braun. “But there are cakes to be made. There are weddings happening in New York every weekend, and not everyone wants to spend thousands of dollars on cakes. There are newer people who are terrific and may not be quite as expensive as I am. So, it’s a very open field. If your product is really, really good, the work will come.”

Ron Ben-Israel, a high-end cake designer and trained pastry chef, has built a multimillion-dollar business in Manhattan — one of his regular clients is Uma Thurman — since starting in the field about 10 years ago. Ben-Israel, who has nearly a dozen people working under him, has also noticed a shift in the industry. “There’s a lot of talent out there,” says Ben-Israel, whose minimum charge for a birthday cake that can serve 30 people is $500 and who has charged as much as $25,000 for one of his creations.

“In the last five or six years, the demand for me to teach and appear at cake demonstrations has been great,” says Ben-Israel, who is known for his “shoe-box” cakes with edible designer sugar shoes perched on top. “It’s amazing, people will pay any price to come and attend a demo. They just want to get a little glimpse of secrets.”

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