Rehoboth bakery's exquisite custom wedding cakes are just the beginning

REHOBOTH — Apple cider donuts have made a big comeback in recent fall seasons, offered at apple orchards all across New England, roadside farm stands, fall festivals and on and on.

When the owners of Confectionary Designs in Rehoboth, Executive Pastry Chef Mark Soliday and Bakery Manager Marie Soliday, decided to get in the apple cider donut game a few years back, Mark created a stepped-up version of the classic to stand out from the crowd.

Initially, their "apple cider – old fashioned donut" was not a big seller. But this fall, the apple cider donuts are moving fast and almost always gone by day’s end.

“We can’t keep up with it,” said Marie Soliday.

“This year, for some reason, out of the blue,” added Mark Soliday. “It’s something we've had on the menu for a while, and it’s one of the products I’m most proud of; we created it ourselves, from scratch. We put a little citric acid in the crust on the outside, so it's tart like an apple."

“It's really hard competing with nostalgia. You're in the orchard with your family on a nice sunny day, and that's what people equate to a cider donut. Here, it's a little more gourmet and again, it's tart."

“With little apples pieces in there,” Marie points out.

“There's so much more going on in there, but it really didn’t take off right away,” Mark continued. “Now I think people are probably starting to see ours is a little different, and they've really taken off.”

More seasonal products featured on the menu, which changes every month, include pumpkin cheesecake with a graham-cracker crust, caramelized pecans and cinnamon cream and a pumpkin bunt cake with brown-butter glaze; both come in individual servings and full size.

From painstakingly-detailed custom wedding cakes right down to the donuts, Mark Soliday says his commitment to quality ingredients, skilled execution and fresh-daily products is the through line connecting all Confectionary Designs’ creations.

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Soliday, who also works as an associate instructor at Johnson & Wales University in the international baking and pastry program, trained at the Culinary Institute of America and spent years in four and five star kitchens including Ritz Carlton and Four Seasons hotels.

Along the way, 25 years ago, Mark and Marie met and married, while Marie worked on the hospitality end of the hotel industry. In 2002, they arrived in Rehoboth to start Confectionary Designs by Mark Soliday — strictly wedding cakes, so Mark could take the teaching position at Johnson & Wales.

Today, the shop serves coffee along with breakfast pastries and donuts, breakfast sandwiches and quiche, individual desserts and cakes, cookies and revolving seasonal and holiday specialties.

“Really, every major holiday that has a family gathering as part of it we have a special menu for it,” Mark said.

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Setting up shop in Rehoboth

Upon relocating to Rehoboth in 2002, Mark and Marie founded Confectionary Designs as a home-based operation and soon caught on with customers, wedding planners and wedding venues in Southeastern Massachusetts and Newport, including various Newport mansions and Five Bridge Inn in Rehoboth.

“It was like a perfect storm,” Mark said. “She was a sales manager working at hotels in Newport and I had summers off. So we were able to sell very quickly, very easily with our past of being at the Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons. We knew how to sell ourselves to the right people and make it profitable.”

It was strictly wedding cakes for the next decade plus.

“When we started our wedding cake business, we really wanted to be just a very small, boutique kind of wedding cake business featuring really high-end, elegant cakes. I'd rather do one cake than 20 cakes in a weekend,” Mark said.

But in 2014, their current location at 462 Winthrop St. became available and they took the chance.

Mark and Marie figured a visible shop with regular hours was the sensible next step for the wedding cake business, but soon their cake-only vision collided with local curiosity and demand.

“We could see there was a need for it. A lot of people kept knocking on the door to see what else we had to offer," Mark said. "We said ‘Why not open up a retail side?’ We live a mile from here. We drove by the spot all the time and said if it’s ever open we're jumping on. So we did and we've been here eight years.”

The new shop with the bakery side opened in 2014, but the menu was still pretty limited: Wedding cakes and donuts.

“We started slow, just doing donuts for the most part. We started with a really small fryer and that weekend we had a line all the way out to the parking lot. So we see, okay, there’s a demand here.

“And so we started producing more donuts, then we started doing our laminated products — croissants and Danish — and so on, and people were really eating it up.”

The menu grew and changed over the next few years. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the wedding cake business vaporized, leaving the Solidays to focus their energy on the bakery side and pandemic-era challenges like curb-side pickup and short staffing.

“We added the pastry case because of COVID, which really took away our wedding business. It made us focus on the shop. Before COVID we were a wedding cake business that happened to do donuts. Now the donut side, and the dessert side, the bakery is its own entity.”

Quality comes at a price

Currently, both the wedding cake and bakery sides at Confectionary Designs are thriving. Staffing remains a challenge with the lingering damage to the food service workforce. Confectionary Designs has two assistant pastry chefs on staff, Daylan Torres and Joshua Livesy. But the search for more kitchen and bakery staff is ongoing.

“For this level of product we need very well trained staff,” Mark said.

The quality of product, he well acknowledges, comes at a cost to the business owner and customers, but he points to daily-produced goodies like croissants — plain, almond and chocolate this month — which require precision techniques, specialized equipment and pricey ingredients, like butter.

“It's a lot of manual labor in order to make it happen," Mark said. "The croissant tells us when it's ready, not the other way around. It’s this beast that tells us what to do and when to do it kind of thing. Like I have to come back at night, pull them out so that they're ready for the morning. No other thing do I have to do that. So a lot of people want them for that reason.

“The price of butter, as well, is through the roof. There's some things we refuse to give up on or cheapen just to make it. Some things we can work with to keep them affordable. But there's some things you just can’t change. Croissants are all about the butter. I can't cut any corners on that. And for that reason, yeah, it's expensive. But there are folks who appreciate it and come here for that reason.”

Likewise, on the wedding cake side, a deep commitment to flavors and design detail and getting it just right is what the Solidays see as setting their service and products apart.

“That attention to detail is evident creation and assembling of sugar flowers that can number in the dozens for a single cake. And no matter how real the flowers may look, Mark promises, they’re all sugar.

“The biggest thing that sets us apart from the other wedding cake businesses is the sugar flowers that we make.

“The design process alone, we meet the bride and groom for tastings to see what they like, and then just doing design consultations is a couple hours, with me sitting down doing a drawing for them and many times taking a number of different items, fabric from the dress, an invitation, colors, whatever it may be, and then having to merge that into a design, that’s the kind of details that would set us apart from an average bakery.

“It's a multiple-day process for that one cake and no one's being screamed at saying ‘you're taking too long.’ It's really just making sure that it's the quality that we're preaching that it is.”

Taunton Daily Gazette staff writer Jon Haglof can be reached at jhaglof@tauntongazette.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Taunton Daily Gazette today.

This article originally appeared on The Taunton Daily Gazette: Rehoboth bakery: Confectionary Designs makes wedding cakes and more