Sweet Slice Of Home For The Troops
Most people like cake. But some people really love it.
"Double fudge crunch cake … tiramisu, my favorite," says Josh Kaye, who owns an Internet cake business, Bake Me A Wish. "A cake means love. That amazing sensation that when you eat it feeling somebody's cared about you to bake it for you."
Kaye's Web site takes online orders for custom cakes for birthdays and holidays, CBS News correspondent Bianca Solorzano reports.
The cakes are made in New York, but are shipped all over - and we do mean all over.
"I received a phone call from a mom who wanted to send her son a birthday cake in Iraq, and I hung up the phone and said, you know, 'What an amazing possibility that would be.'"
He was already donating cakes, to the tune of 5,000 a year, to the Make A Wish Foundation.
He found the pipeline to the troops with the help of the military support group, Soldiers' Angels, which adopts service members stationed overseas.
"The two weeks before he deployed, this is him in my father's yard," said Vicki Spisso. For as long as she can remember, her 19-year-old son Brian Jr. wanted to be a soldier. He's been serving in Iraq since September.
If she was to make a cake for her son, she said she would make "a chocolate cake. He likes chocolate."
This is the first Christmas away from his family.
"That's the hardest part - not being able to talk to him every day or know that he's around," she said. "It's the constant worry."
So this holiday season, Brian got his chocolate cake, double fudge crunch. His entire base got cakes too: more than two dozen to share courtesy of Bake Me A Wish.
"They can all, you know, have cake together and just give them a little bit of home for the short period of time while they're eating their cakes," Spisso said.
This holiday season some 2,000 cakes are being shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan, but Kaye has an even bigger wish for Bake Me A Wish.
FYI: More ways to help our troops this season.
"Our goal is to send out a cake to every soldier stationed around the world," Kaye said.
Kaye's recipe of love in a box, providing a sweet slice of home for the holidays … and every day.