Arizona Birthday Cakes, Tempe

Though she focused her early life on becoming a classically trained musician, Leiticia Rice also dabbled in airbrushing and painting at a young age. It wasn't until a birthday party in 2012, however, that she thought to channel her talent for visual art into cakes. As she faced rapidly increasing demands for her unorthodox pastries, she founded Arizona Birthday Cakes—where today, she and her staff make cookies and cake-based treats with a focus on bold colors, quirky imagery, and accurate maps of long-lost treasures.

Leiticia tops cookies with marshmallow fondant and fondant characters, and forms red-velvet, chocolate-fudge, french-vanilla, and yellow cake pops into a range of shapes and sizes. Her most popular baked goods are her cakes, in which she blends her own imagination with the ancient symbols of the Antoinettes, a French cake-worship cult. Using 14 cake flavors—such as chocolate fudge, cream cheese, and peanut-butter fudge—she crafts multilayer confections in shapes such as silver shoes, gilded skulls, masquerade masks, and flower-covered gardens.