'Mortgage Cake' that saved woman's Teaneck home now on Oprah's favorite things list

The apple cake that saved Angela Logan’s Teaneck home from foreclosure 14 years ago has been chosen as one of Oprah Winfrey’s favorite things for her 2023 holiday gift list.

Logan’s cake was selected as one of 48 items, ranging from desserts, gadgets, and home beauty and fashion goods, for the annual holiday shopping guide featured on OprahDaily.com and in the winter issue of "O Quarterly" on newsstands Tuesday.

This year, most gifts have been selected from small businesses, including women-owned, Black-owned and other minority-owned businesses from around the country.

“We’re just exuberant, we’re over the apple orchard with excitement over this,” Logan said. “Right now, we’re just baking away."

In 2009, Logan baked her way out of a financial crisis and began a new career for herself. She was on the brink of losing her township home in the wake of the housing crash.

To stave off foreclosure, the actress and comic began baking homemade "mortgage apple cakes" based on her grandmother’s recipe and selling them for $40 each.

The story of Logan's impromptu bake sale went viral after the initial story written by Jay Levin, the former obituary writer for The Record, ran in the paper.

After the first 42 cakes she sold to friends and neighbors to make her initial payment of $2,559.94, orders began pouring in from places as far as Hong Kong, Africa and London.

Logan, who had appeared in commercials and print ads and on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," was making ends meet braiding hair in a salon and studying nursing at Bergen Community College in hopes of a steadier income when she received a foreclosure intention notice in 2009.

But after those early days baking out of her Teaneck kitchen as she desperately tried to hold onto her house, she reinvented herself and launched a new career — first taking online orders and selling her cakes at area farmers markets before opening her brick-and-mortar shop in Teaneck in 2016.

The following year she began shipping nationwide through Goldbelly, an online market for food gifts.

“In 2009, facing the loss of her house, this founder started selling her apple cakes to pay off her loan. It worked—and we know why. There wasn’t a crumb left after our tasting,” Winfrey said of the cake on her website.

Logan, whose story was turned into a made-for-TV movie "Apple Mortgage Cake," in 2014 starring Kimberly Elise, said she was humbled to be chosen for the list and grateful to the customers who recommended her cake.

“They called us and said, 'We heard about your cake, someone tasted it and recommended you, and we want to try it ourselves,' " she said. “That was really the most exciting part.”

Once Logan heard she might be chosen, the shop had to prepare by buying more freezers and packaging, setting up an Amazon storefront and negotiating deals with shipping companies.

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“At first, you’re like don’t get too excited, they’re just tasting cake. You don’t want to get your hopes up too much,” she said. “But then they just about tell you, and you think OK now we have to get this together, we have to be prepared.”

Logan’s goal is to one day sell her cakes in upscale and specialty grocery stores and open a restaurant highlighting southern cuisine, to honor southern matriarchs like her grandmother, who taught her how to bake.

The shop is rooted in family, from her grandmother’s recipe for a rich and deeply spiced cake filled with apples and slathered with cream cheese icing that started it all, to her mother, husband and three sons who helped her build the business.

“Small companies don’t have the advertising budget and the opportunities that bigger companies do, so something like this happens, it helps us move to another level and gives us those opportunities to grow,” she said.

To see the favorite things list visit https://www.giftsicle.com/presents/2019-list-oprah-favorite-things-2020/.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: 'Mortgage Cake' by Teaneck woman on Oprah's favorite things 2023