Annie Lim’s eyes light up and she waves her hands.

“I have an idea. I’d like to make a zombie cake. I want it to be life size.”

She stops herself and decides on a smaller creature that would fit on her Chatham Street shop’s front table. With gummy worms slithering from its chocolatey base, it’ll be a “horrifying” cake for the trick-or-treating children on Halloween, she says.

“Then I’ll be chopping the zombie,” she smiles. “I want them to taste my chocolate.”

Lim is Steveston’s own Cake Boss, making detailed sculptures that are entirely edible, right down to sugar stitches on a Chanel handbag cake and the fondant figurines on a child’s birthday cake.

A star pastry chef in Manila, the Philippines native moved here with her family four years ago. In August she made the next move in her sweet career by opening Chocolate Lover Cakes in Steveston to spread her love of cake design and their fresh and gooey chocolate insides.

Her specialty cakes are gaining popularity in light of TV series like Cake Boss and Ace of Cakes that demonstrate the hours of skill needed to craft a winning design.

Baking was just a hobby of Lim’s in college when she experimented with cake recipes and tested her creations on her friends. She enjoyed it so much, she opened her own cake shop a few years later. Lim studied under pastry greats around the world and soon began teaching others the craft.

Her designs won attention, leading to instructional videos, cookbooks and her own short-lived TV baking show in the Philippines.

“This is my passion. I can stand for eight or 10 hours doing this and not feel tired,” she says. “I enjoy every time I bake, every time I decorate.”

Her passion for artistry can be traced to her early years growing up in a compound of a movie production company, for which her father worked. Her godmother was famous Filipino film actress Charito Solis.

She took up painting, photography and dabbled in a variety of other visual arts. It helped develop Lim’s eye for detail in her cake designs.

Her cakes are made from scratch and each one of her designs is different. A cake can take days to finish, even with help from her youngest daughter, Kim, a Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts pastry graduate.

Among her favourite designs is a cake she calls “Under the Sea,” a cake nearly three-feet tall full of ocean life, including a mermaid who sits atop with a tiny handbag—clasped closed by an octopus.

“I get so many ideas—just like popping popcorn,” says Lim.

Her favourite cake flavour is her own recipe for a moist chocolate variety, featuring a mix of Belgium and German chocolate.

“First of all, you have to like what you see. Then when you taste it, you must like it every bite,” she says. “Freshly baked cakes taste so much different than frozen cake.”

Transporting tall, towering cakes isn’t easy—as some dramatic TV moments detail—but Lim hasn’t experienced any mishaps yet.

“My husband is a civil engineer, so he’s been helping me. The structure, the base, has to be stable.”