Icing Smiles bakes happiness for sick children and their families

Apr. 8—Some people look at a cake and see calories. Tracy Quisenberry looks at a cake and sees caring.

The 54-year-old Maple Lawn resident is the founder of Icing Smiles, a nonprofit built upon layers and layers of flour, sugar, fondant and, well, sweetness.

Icing Smiles creates magical cakes for children who are critically ill — think of it as a bake-a-wish. Since launching the organization in 2010, Quisenberry has watched it grow into a network that includes thousands of volunteers who have delivered over 30,000 cakes nationwide to ailing kids.

Quisenberry, a certified accountant, marvels over the incredible creations bakers have made and the overwhelming joy of families receiving so much love and support all in a bite of cake.

Sometimes, she wonders how all of the ingredients came together to make Icing Smiles a sweet success.

"I have always had a heart for service and no artistic ability at all," Quisenberry said, with a laugh, as she shared the nonprofit's origin story.

It begins with Quisenberry giving birth twice to premature babies and spending a lot of time in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with other moms just like her.

"The experience of dealing with the NICU, as well as chronic illness with my second [child], kind of really made me feel for medical families, particularly medical moms," she said. "And the stress that [they] go through about not being able to provide their child normalcy."

Quisenberry found her normalcy through baking and quickly realized that "cake is so much more than cake," especially for children.

"My very first cake, which was supposed to look like a rubber duck, really looked like a pineapple with a beak," she said. "But despite that, it had such an impact on my son's first birthday party. Like all the kids thought it was so cool.

"And I was like, if an ugly cake can do this, what would the impact of a well-executed cake be?"

That was the light bulb — or oven timer — that sparked the creation of Icing Smiles.

Quisenberry was living in Ohio at the time, and started with a cold call to her local Ronald McDonald House, offering to give 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."

Icing Smiles, Inc.

Icingsmiles.org, 561- 593-8314, Instagram.com/icingsmiles