Anyone who has had the good fortune of crossing Wendy Gee’s path in Pacifica will quickly learn she leaves a sweet impression. Quite literally.

This neighborhood cake queen is baking the world a better place. She creates dessert tables out of a magazine spread for the playground birthday bashes, brings treats to her children’s school each month, handing out goodies to everyone from the teachers to the crossing guards, and runs a tray of cupcakes down to the Pacifica firefighters on Valentine’s Day. If there is any complaint it is that her treats are so pretty you almost don’t want to eat them. Almost.

Nicknamed Betty Crocker by her family when she was just a child, Gee’s passion for baking traces way back. 

“I baked a lot as a child on my own,” says Gee. She recalls making her first batch of sugar cookies by herself at just 9 years old. “My family would get together every Sunday for dinner so I would almost always make a little treat.”

She grew up the second youngest of seven children in Orem, Utah, a city about 45 minutes outside of Salt Lake City.

Early on, she learned the secret ingredient to baking.

“It made people happy. That’s where a lot of my passion still comes from, is that it makes people happy,” says Gee.

Now living in Pacifica with her husband and three children, Gee says her passion for baking only increased when her oldest child, Madeleine, was born eight years ago.

“That’s when I became a stay-at-home mom,” she said. “It’s not that I had more time on my hands, it’s just that I was in my house more.”

Ironically, she worked as a dental assistant for many years. After leaving the workforce, she started learning how to make cakes from scratch and understanding how ingredients work together.

“There is a science to it,” she says. “There are substitutes you can do, like instead of adding water you can substitute buttermilk. But you have to keep the proportions the same, the liquids and the fats.”

She is constantly reading online recipes and learning new techniques to gather ideas.

“I will puree fresh berries and, instead of just adding milk, I will add fresh berries and milk, and it will make this really yummy butter cream. Or fold in chopped up Oreos to make cookies and cream frosting,” says Gee.

She finds reason to bake for people in her community every other day. It could be a teacher’s birthday, a friend’s baby shower or a gathering at her church. Gee never has to look far for inspiration.

“Pacifica is such a great community. It has a small town beach feel to it,” she says. “I feel like people are more involved with each other.”

Juggling three kids ages 8, 5 and 2, she is clearly good at multitasking, but she says baking calms her.

“I have a hard time sitting still. I think that it is good for me to have a few extra balls up in the air,” she says.

And she’s learned some tricks of the trade.

“I don’t do everything at one time,” she says. “There are things that you can freeze. Cake actually tastes better after it’s been frozen,” says Gee, explaining that fruit gets mushy after being in the freezer because the cells freeze and burst, whereas cake gets more tender and dense.  

Neighbor and friend Samantha Berg remembers meeting Gee at the local playground.

“We were both very pregnant at the playground and we were due a couple of weeks apart from each other. It was just an instant conversation starter,” recalls Berg. Gee soon found out Berg had a gluten allergy and said she had a great recipe for gluten-free cupcakes.  The next time they saw each other Gee had a surprise.

“She handed me this cupcake and I had to take a picture of it and send it to my husband. It looked gorgeous and had this beautiful rose on top,” says Berg.

“She can do a giant wedding cake or car-shaped cookies for a 2-year-old’s birthday party and she’ll never fail to impress. She gives it all the same level of love and attention.” Berg, a photographer, urged Gee to let her photograph some of her creations.

“When I saw her talent and creativity I knew it needed to be photographed properly. This beautiful stuff shouldn’t just be gobbled up and sitting in people’s stomachs. People needed to see this, not just eat it. It was a tragedy to me. It needed to be documented permanently in some way,” says Berg, who eventually worked with Gee to carry out several food photography shoots.

Some of Gee’s most under-documented events remain her most memorable. Take her daughter’s “Chef” birthday party, to which children wore homemade chef hats, decorated their own personal mini-cakes with candy and frosting, and drew pictures on sugar cookies with edible markers.  It will come as no surprise that her children start planning their birthday cakes 11 months early.

As for the future, Gee says she’d eventually like to turn it into a business, but right now she is content spreading the happiness, one cupcake at a time. And perhaps the sweetest part is that it’s starting to come full circle for Gee. Her oldest daughter is now the age she was when she first began baking.

“It’s fun to see her get excited about it. She’s getting really into it. She was dipping pretzel rods the other day and she literally did a better job than most adults would do,” she says.

And, for Gee, passing on this passion is the icing on the cake.

See more of her work at sweetgeetreats.com