When Life Brings You Foreclosure, Bake A Mortgage Apple Cake

If you haven’t heard of the woman who turned her bad foreclosure situation into a new career baking apple cakes, here is the story below. They say that the Chinese symbol for crisis also means opportunity. This is a real life example.

Apple cake’s success leads to reinvention
By JAY LEVIN The Record
Posted: 03/19/2010 11:00 PM

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Angela Logan did more than save her Teaneck home from foreclosure when she began a frenzy of apple peeling and baking last summer. The actress and mother of three laid the foundation for a new career.

Eight months after selling enough “Mortgage Apple Cakes” to meet her house payment — and becoming a media celebrity in the process — the 56-year-old Logan is still pursuing acting. But more and more, she is earning a living as a cake entrepreneur, as well as training to be a life coach.

With the fear of losing her home having passed, she is reinventing herself.

Logan, who has done commercials and stand-up comedy and appeared on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” had been looking to switch to nursing — steadier work than acting. Then the Mortgage Apple Cake took off and landed her on NBC’s “Today,” Fox’s “Wendy Williams Show” and cable news shows.

Asked to describe herself now, Logan said: “An actress building a side business baking cakes and working to find ways to help others going through strenuous situations like I was in.”

Toward the latter end, she wants to become a life coach — “with a component of helping people who are having trouble with their mortgage.”

To help chart a path, Logan is working with New York-based branding consultants Channeling Media. Calling Logan “inspirational,” company partner Melinda Fishman said she envisions Logan on TV, or on the speaker circuit, or writing a blog, or launching a product line that gives back to the community. Reinvention is a “long-term process,” said Fishman, who expects to have Logan “in some type of vehicle” later this year.

Fishman said Logan, familiar with being in front of a camera, has the potential to be a household name. “When I mention her name to people, there is a recollection, and when I say the Mortgage Apple Cake lady, they say, ‘Oh, right! I saw her on CNN!’ ”

As for Logan’s signature confection, it is being produced according to her recipe by online cake seller Bake Me a Wish. The actress signed a two-year licensing agreement with the company last summer.

Bake Me a Wish has sold more than 3,000 Mortgage Apple Cakes and has added Angela’s Espresso Brownie Cake to what it hopes will be a line of Angela Logan cakes. Five percent of the sale of the Mortgage Apple Cake goes to a non-profit consumer debt counseling service.

“We hope to see Angela become a huge success and want to be a part of her success,” said company founder Josh Kaye.

Logan is also developing cakes on her own. Bake Me a Wish allows her to bake and sell at Zoe’s Cupcake Café in Teaneck. She is working on an apple rum cake with white chocolate drizzle and a caramel apple cake.

For now, the only retail source for Logan’s Mortgage Apple Cake is the café, which supports a Bergen County non-profit that helps teen mothers and their babies.

The Mortgage Apple Cake saga has gotten a second wind in 2010 as several national magazines have told how Logan creatively found a way out of a dire situation — an economic hardship story with a happy ending. More magazine featured the Teaneck mom in an article about five women who “defined extreme reinvention” and photographed her in — where else? — an apple orchard.

Source: Bergen Record